HTPC and power usage

Access

I know not everyone is too worried about how much wattage their HTPC is using, and everyones setup is different - be it number of cards/hard drives/power supply rating etc...

But just out of sheer wonder, i put a power meter on the mains cable of mine today just to see what wattage it is burning.



My system as mentioned on here is an old one but works fine for me (except for it reving up like an aircraft on takeoff sometimes)

Its an old dell optiplex gl620 like below - XP with XBMC 11.0 Beta 3 at the mo... does me fine till i eventually upgrade.



Its showing in Approx Watts:

About 100 watts during XBMC main home screen

About 80-90 watts during SD movie playback (have no HD movies so cant check that)

About 120 watts during mp3 playback (with visualization on and off)

And when put to sleep it shows 3 watts.

Just thought it might be of interest to someone.


I would love to get one of those Revos eventually... does anyone have what sort of wattage readings they are running, out of curiosity?

andy1249

I would love to get one of those Revos eventually... does anyone have what sort of wattage readings they are running, out of curiosity?

Even with the most powerful of PC's that would be a rather pointless exercise.

Your figures mean that if you ran the unit 10 hours a day , which is probably not very likely I know , you would just be using one unit per day.
I picked 10 hours to bring it to one unit just so the math is easier.

Currently the dearest you would be paying for electricity would be from the ESB and thats 19c per unit. 1 Unit is 1 kilowatt hour , which is what you would use after 10 hours of usage.

That means at 10 hours per day you would be using 19c of electricity per day , thats about 70 euro per year assuming you used it 365 days per year !

So , in terms of personal cost , its a pittance really.

That just leaves being green as a reason for being concerned about wattage.

Compared to your really big usages , which is always lighting and heating , this is a minnow , and if being green was the concern , saving on any AV units should be the bottom of the priority list.

Turning the central heating down by a couple of degrees , something that you would probably not notice , would swamp the usage of your HTPC in terms of savings and being green.

Access

But just out of sheer wonder, i put a power meter on the mains cable of mine today just to see what wattage it is burning.

Just thought it might be of interest to someone.

I do realise that andy, im not a green freak or anything! as i said it was just more of an experiment really.

BigEejit

You power usage is likely to be because those old dells regularly used prescott pentium 4's that have a tdp of 115watts. The chipset would also not have been optimized for power savings and generally speaking computers of the time had relatively inefficient power supplies.

I checked my htpc playing 720p media and it uses 35watts, dont usually play music through it or game on it.

Access

BigEejit wrote: »

You power usage is likely to be because those old dells regularly used prescott pentium 4's that have a tdp of 115watts. The chipset would also not have been optimized for power savings and generally speaking computers of the time had relatively inefficient power supplies.

I checked my htpc playing 720p media and it uses 35watts, dont usually play music through it or game on it.

What make is your HTPC BigEejit?

BigEejit

I made it myself, using a antec fusion remote case.. Asus motherboard, an amd athlon 2 x4 610e cpu (45 watts tdp) and two hd's (ssd boot and a 1tb drive for data) and a passive graphics cards (5570 1gb)

Nice and responsive and when you can offload video processing to the graphics card it stays nice and cool (cpu <25 degrees c). I have a passive heatsink on the cpu but have a near silent 140mm fan blowing into the case above it that also keeps the cpu, northbridge and ram cool. A second 140mm fan blows on the passive graphics card and fanless power supply.

I had originally intended that the thing would run completely fanless but temps on just about everything were through the roof doing anything bar idling. Two nice big fans doing ~600 rpms are all but impossible to hear.

If I was doing it again I would have gotten a phenom 2 x4 cpu, lot more grunt when you need it but the cores lower clock speed (and power usage) when idle.

ixtlan

I do take the points about this being one of the more minor consumers of electricity in the house.

However there's no harm in giving some thought to it, especially since you have a power meter. I'd agree if the PC spends most of it's time in sleep mode, it's not much of an issue, but if it ends up being on a lot, then you might justify a new shiny toy on the basis that it might pay for itself over a few years!

Ix.