On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 10:45:08AM -0400, tallison@tacocat.net wrote: > This weekend I finally carpeted my office and decided that it would be > really need to move all 4 computers into that one room (11' x 8'). > > It's now a good 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the house. > > I think I'll be moving most of them back out of that room. I have 3 PCs and a stereo with a Class A amp that sucks 200W in a similar size room. I rarely need any other form of heating. > But it brought me to another question. > > Even though I have power supplies that add up to >1400 watts I know that > isn't really the case because the fuses haven't blown. > > Does anyone have any information or methods which might determine what a > "typical" computers power consumption might be? Start by making loads and loads of ice in your freezer, so you can get away with turning it and the fridge off for several hours. Turn the computer on, turn everything else off, trip all the circuit breakers except the one feeding the computer to make sure; watch your electricity meter, and time how long it takes to use one kWh. If it takes 5 hours, your computer's taking 200W, etc. This will probably read high, ie. safe, and also tells you how much it costs to run. This is a pain, so I make an educated guess using rules of thumb: motherboard 75-100W, graphics card (w/o fan) 10W (with) 25W, each hard drive 15W, CD drive 10W but only when active, other stuff 10-20W. This gives roughly 200W for my GA-7ZXE/1.533GHz Athlon 1800XP/six hard drives. It has a 235W PSU which starts to get unhappy if I put another hard drive on, so it's not too far out. Bigger PSU is on TOGET list. I'm going to guess that you maybe have more capable motherboards but fewer hard drives, and your PSUs are running at around half their capacity or a little more, which is good. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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