The Power "Cost" Of High Performance Gaming Rigs.

[Stu]

Hi Guys,
Bought a new toy today and thought you might like to see some results I got from it.

Its just another in wall power adapter that reads out Watts, but its unique in that it has the LCD display on a cable so you can monitor it on your desk. far more usefull than getting down on my hands and knees everytime I want to see what sort of power draw I am generating. (I do this to estimate what Clocks/Volts I can get away with on benchmarks by the way... the more power it draws, the closer my cards are to OCP 😉 )

More interestingly, it lets you input the current cost of your elctricity in pence per KWh and then tells you what it will cost to run this appliance for 30 days / 1 year. That got me to wondering what this rig costs to run.... I now know, and thought you might like to know too. 🙂

Anyway, I digress...
Just to ensure its as accurate as my old one, I plugged them in together... no problems there as you can see.



Then I decided to do some tests.


Sleep mode. Under £1 per month.



Idling with speedstep disabled. £22.37p per month. 3p per hour.


Folding @ home with 3x GPU's £63.37p per month. 9p per hour.


Carbon footprint per month for your folders out there.



Running 3D Mark Fire Strike with 1 GPU £46.32 per month. 6p per hour.


Running 3D Mark Fire Strike with 2 GPU £74.02 per month. 10p per hour.


Running 3D Mark Fire Strike with 3 GPU £102 per month. 14p per hour.


And finally, just for the hell of it, running kombuster at the max it will do, with all shaders etc on and the cards fully overclocked to 1275/1950 with 1.290v / 1.800v just to see how much power this thing could draw in a worst case scenario....




£135 per month or 18p per hour.! Jees.. you could buy a car on HP for that!

So there you go... of course these figures mean absolutely sod all as nobody benchmarks 24hrs a day, but its usefull to see how the extra GPU's dont just cost you the purchase price, they have a running cost too. I guess the folding figure might be of interest to folk though as a lot of you guys really do that 24hrs a day.

Its also worth noting that I have 3 monitors that are not part of the above equasion as they are all powered from another spur. Hmm.. come to think of it, so are the printers, the backup NAS and my Raid Server. Oh... and my laptop, second PC and a few other PC bits.

Nice cheap hobby this isnt it? LOL

[Granger]

Same thoughts as Tenblade here, lets not let the wife know 😉

[HalloweenWeed]

Hey Stu, or anyone else for that matter, what's the RW power draw when the computer is sleeping? I'm talking Win7 S3 mode here, NOT Win8 hybernate a.k.a. hybrid sleep.
Just interested in the Wattage, not really the "cost" as I am in U.S.
If I do the math, according to your price/Watts during Kombuster, I get ~8.5W. Is that right? I see you have Win7, so can I assume that is S3 sleep mode, not "hybrid sleep?"
Could you just confirm that the Wattage is approx. 8.6W?

[Stu]

Hi, My S3 sleep mode is 6.5 - 7.5w

[HalloweenWeed]

Thank you Stu. GTK.