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How much power does a Macbook Pro use?

  • 04-09-2010 7:57pm
    #1
    Elessar
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,267 ✭✭✭


    Can anyone help me find out how much power the 2010 Macbook Pro (core i5 2.4Ghz) will use at full tilt - All CPUs at 100%, nVidia GPU at 100%, full screen brightness, Airport on, fans at 6000rpm.

    I'm trying to find out how much it is going to cost to run it at full tilt (using a distributed computing project in BOINC) for a few hours everyday.


Comments

  • #2
    conor.hogan.2
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,246 ✭✭✭conor.hogan.2


    Not the answer - http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/environment.html - but useful.

    I would say the answer is impossible to find out - but searching for ''the laptop that using least power'' or something of the likes is the best way to go.

    But even then - battery life is tested - which is most power green efficient is rarely accurately and fully tested.

    Good luck though.

    http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/laptop_power.html - old but of great use if you take into consideration the processors and adapt to http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/revisiting-how-much-power-does-my-laptop-really-use.html and then adapt to today.


  • #3
    Inspector Gadget
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,393 ✭✭✭Inspector Gadget


    There's no such thing as running a CPU, or GPU, or whatever at 100% - you will hit a point where there's no spare processing capacity, yes, but you can't have absolutely all of a given processor active at once. Not only that, but as the program won't be doing the same thing all the time, different computational units will be active at different times, so a maximum figure will always be approximate and can only be measured as an average.

    The only way to get a rough idea as to what kind of power the thing's consuming, you'll need to get one of those mains power monitors (I got one in Maplin a while back - something like this) - it's the only way you'll account for efficiency losses in the power supply. Though as a ballpark, if we assume it'll draw close to the effective maximum of the power supply (that's 85W still for a new Macbook Pro, right?) and assuming that the power supply is at least 80% efficient, the power demands would top out at about 100W, meaning it'd consume a unit of electricity (i.e. 1kWh every ten hours or so, worst-case.

    The actual figure will probably be lower, but it's a place to start. Hope that helps.

    Gadget


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