how much electricity does a pc use?

tuxy

i was just wondering how much it would costs
i know they dont use alot but would it make a big differnce to my esb bill if i left it on 24/7 ?

Balfa

Don't take this for gospel, but i'm pretty sure the whole thing, excluding monitor, generally uses less than 100W. If you have a lot of drives, it may be more. The monitor probably uses somewhere around another 100W - 150W, depending on the size.

These are just random figures i got off someone aaaaaaages ago by asking the same question.

Wolf

Not tooooooo sure but i do know in trems of TV etc that it uses very little most of the power been used by the monitor :?

The_Bullman

would your power supply give you a good idea as to the power usage??

leeroybrown

If you have a 300 Watt PSU then the max you can use is one kilowatt every 200 minutes of operation for the main unit. Most of the time unless your system is highly loaded the voltage usage will be far less. Even at 300 Watts the cost is tiny.

My own monitor uses 110 Watts of power while on. Thats one unit of electricity every 9 hours!

In total the amount is tiny. Less than 5 cent an hour.

BabyEater

Found this link a while back http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/26003.pdf
Which shows that a good system XP2100 384MB RAM and the rest comes in at 279 watts , and an 1800 with 128MB of RAM and not as much stuff comes to 182 Watts

Matfinn

Heres something that some engineer told me. I used to have all five computers in my room firing on all cylinders at one stage, monitors and all, and he told me that it would cost as much to keep them things running as one of those old electric heaters, you know the boxy ones from the 70's.

Afaik, the computers motherboard, ram and cpu, would use about 1/3 the electricity of a lightbulb, and the hard drives, fans, and cdroms would use about the same as a hairdryer id imagine.

Matt

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

jd

A poweredge with monitor would probably dissipate enough heat to keep a small bedroom reasonably warm..(haven't tried it though)

BioHazRd

This may seem like an odd way of replying, but here goes

Recently I ran a LAN party over 12 hours with 25 pc's and 2 servers. The total cost for electricity for that day as confirmed be a meter reading was €5. As this party was not in a place of residence, the ESB use a 5X multiplier - therefore it can be deduced that in a house, this would only have cost €1.

I'm sure you can work it out further yourself.

BTW - all machines were of a good powerful spec, and gaming uses a lot of resources so it would be fair to assume that these values were the max that you would normally see

Hope that helps

Bio

Borzoi

this can be calculated very easily. On the back of every pice of mains equipment is printed the electical rating.

For example, on my monitor it says: 120/220V 2.1A/1.2A
As the supply here is nominally 220V, the Amperage is 1,2A

Multiply 220V x 1.2A =264W (Watts) = 0.264kW

The ESB charge by the kilowatt hour, thats 1000 watts run for an hour. Its about 12c per kWhr, so to run the mointor for an hour would set you back 0.264 x 12c = 3.16c per hour of runtime.

Your PC box can be worked out similarly, (mine is 2A) but bear in mind that the high use items in the PC are the motors on CD drives, hard drives, fans etc,. So actually power consumption over time would be a lot less than the maximum.

So if you assume that the PC box on average only draws half its max rating, the charge would be 2.64c per hour

All told so about 6c per hour, €1.44 per day, €86.40 per 2 month billing period - so you may not want to do this, unless it's your ESB bill!!

leeroybrown

I've tried the whole room heating thing with my PC.

The Oil Bolier was air locked (during winter) so every morning I'd start my PC and run 'John' everyones favourite UNIX password validation tool. In the evening I'd have a warm room and a few more passwords

spooky donkey

Well drink one less cup of day, and you can power youre pc for the whole day for the same price as one kettle boil