[ale] screen saver eats 15 - 30 watts

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

I never have liked the blank screen concept, since it's harder to tell 
if the machine is still running or is locked up or something.  But, it 
might save another few watts as you said.

Ron

On 4/2/2013 11:39 AM, Scott Bragg wrote:
> You might try the 'blank screen' screen saver and see if it drops it 
> even more.   Anything you do with the system that produces animations 
> is going to use more power than just blanking the screen and 
> displaying nothing.
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Ron Frazier (ALE) 
> <atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com 
> <mailto:atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi all,
>
>     I've been monitoring my desktop computer that I mentioned in the
>     litecoin thread.  I have a great little device attached to the
>     power cord called a kill-a-watt ez, which you can buy at Home
>     Depot.  This device tabulates both instantaneous power consumption
>     (every second) and long term power consumption over a period of
>     time, as well as cost to operate whatever is plugged into it.
>
>     At any given time, the numbers vary quite a bit, but you can get a
>     sense of the average.
>
>     When I came in, this morning, I noticed the numbers were higher
>     than they typically were in its steady state mode.  I did some
>     testing and found that the screen saver was consuming 15 - 30 W.
>      I should note that there is 100 W difference in power consumption
>     between idling my CPU and maxing it out.  So, the screen saver is
>     apparently taxing the cpu and gpu a bit.
>
>     At $ .097 / kwh, it costs $ 7 / mo to run a 100 W (or .1 KW) load
>     for 24 hours / day for 30 days.
>
>     So, just running the screen saver is potentially costing me $ 2 /
>     mo.  It's not going to break the bank, but there's no point in
>     wasting that energy and money.  My monitors are LCD's, which are
>     not susceptible to burn-in.  So, I don't care what the screen
>     saver it doing.  It's more of a lock screen.
>
>     The screen saver I was using is mystify (windows).  It puts fancy
>     curvy geometric lines on the screen which continually move and
>     change.  It looks cool.  I changed it to a slowly moving line of
>     text which shows the computer name.  This text is a solid color,
>     and I turned off the "reflections" effect, which requires lots of
>     3d graphics computations.
>
>     My power consumption now actually drops by a couple of W when the
>     screen saver is on.
>
>     So, if you have a fancy smancy 3d screen saver running on a big
>     computer, or several big computers, maybe with multiple monitors,
>     you might want to look at how much power it's consuming.
>
>     Just thought I'd pass this along.  Hope it's helpful.
>
>     Sincerely,
>
>     Ron
>
>
>
>     --
>
>     Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and
>     K-9 Mail.
>     Please excuse my potential brevity if I'm typing on the touch screen.
>
>     (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might
>     want to
>     call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate
>     energy
>     mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages
>     very quickly.)
>
>     Ron Frazier
>     770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
>     linuxdude AT techstarship.com <http://techstarship.com>
>
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     Ale mailing list
>     Ale at ale.org <mailto:Ale at ale.org>
>     http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>     See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>     http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>    

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20130402/85cf51a7/attachment.html>