Ways to conserve power in your PC and at home.

In light of this thread I thought it might be nice to compose a list of power saving ideas for computers. If you have ideas, just post which category it goes under and a mod will add it to my post.

Lets use these two categories:

1. Ways to get by without a 1KW power supply
2. Ways to conserve energy at home and lower your power bill

====Ways to get by without a 1KW power supply=====
1. Get a 80% efficient Power supply
2. More is not better. 1KW powersupplies can actually put out less than a good 650W
3. Put those storage/backup hard drives on delayed startup, only your primary needs boot with machine.
4. Not using that hard drive while playing games? let it spin down.
5.
6.

====Ways to conserve energy at home====
1. Your computer is not being used at night, why is the monitor on?
2. Not folding or doing anything else at night? Standby mode.
3. Read the above section and apply those changes
4. Use only a power supply you need, not the one that is the biggest and badest.
5. Us your OS power saving options, including down throttling your CPU when not in use.
6.

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Vector wrote:

Get a 80% efficient Power supply

Very high on the list, since this will also get you into the LAN.

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Vector wrote:

1. Get a 80% efficient Power supply
2. More is not better. 1KW powersupplies can actually put out less than a good 650W
1. Your computer is not being used at night, why is the monitor on?

check

A NeoHe 550 powers my 12hdd/x800pro fileserver that torrents 24/7 & I turn off monitors at night.

add in: plan to buy a high quality 550Watt instead of a bargain 600+.

like some others I build around a 550 watt
2X250Gig drives
8800GTX on water
E6700@ 3.45
4X512 RAM @ 1.9V

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While I don't have anything to add, I just want to say this is a great post. Awesome.

*DISCLAIMER*
No, I'm not a tree hugger, I'm just actively aware of what we are doing to the earth. (and the future of our race)

I always turn off my monitor when I go to bed. Saves energy cost plus wtf is the point of bright light staring me in the face late at night?

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I turn my LCDs off at night because I value the life of the backlights. Granted packing them around to LANs probably doesn't help backlight life any but every little bit counts. Smile

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I'll be honest, we're throwing science at the wall here to see what sticks. No idea what it'll do.

My monitor's next to my bed, so it power saves after 3 minutes of inactivity. I torrent at night, so that keeps the hard drives on. I also fold. I have a 80+ % psu, but it's also a 1kW. Dunno how that figures in to things. All I know is hardocp and jonnyguru love the the enermax galaxy and their standards are pretty damn high, if you doubt it read one of their psu reviews.

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I just turn my computers completely off each night, makes no sense to leave them on 24/7 when my wife and I are only on them for about 3 - 4 hours a day. that's like 20 hours of them off, saves some on the power bill too.

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Vector wrote:

1. Your computer is not being used at night, why is the monitor on?

5. Us your OS power saving options, including down throttling your CPU when not in use.

The latter will take care of the former. Mainly the full power conservation modes on a monitor provide savings close to completely powering it off. On an LCD, dropping the backlights out remove most of the power consumption; for CRTs turning off the electron guns removes 95% of the energy consumption. The only exception is if you've got an ancient CRT that doesn't support the power save modes (my server doesn't need anything more than a small text console, turning that off is useful).

I'm unsure how turning off a system compares will full power save modes. Though I certainly turn my desktop off at night.

Use Blackle instead of Google. It's a small step, but with great numbers it could make a huge difference in power usage.

Quote:

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

www.blackle.com

aww too bad there's no custom page for that Sad

i think hibernate is better than standby...

hibernate turns off the WHOLE system but keeps it in the state it was when you hibernated while standby still has all the fans running and stuff...

and crts are powerhogs vs. an lcd of same size

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I am the original stage monkey

All the above suggestions are excellent ones and I applaud anyone using them. Here is my attempt at lowering our power consumption.

I built a core 2 duo mobile desktop recently with the goal of building a good gaming machine while saving power and it has the following inside:

ASUS N4L-VM DH (667fsb) mATX
Core 2 Duo Mobile T5500 @ 1.66ghz (going to upgrade this soon, but is very expensive for small gains)
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 675 (PC2 5400) Dual Channel Kit
PNY 8800GTS 320MB
Antec earthwatts EA380 ATX12V v2.0 380W Power Supply >80%, I believe it was rated at 85% at load.
2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive, 7200 RPM, Model: ST3160811AS
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer 7.1 Channels Sound Card
Sony DVD +/- Burner 16x
120mm Fan
92mm Fan
80mm Fan
Tiny 60mm(?) CPU Fan
2 x 10" UV Lights
2 x 4" UV Lights

I have never seen it peak above 210watts even under load, I believe it idles at 140watts. (this was before I added the sound card and second set of lights)

I'll run 3dmark06 and measure power consumption again and post the results later today.

Well here are my results:

IDLE - 125watts/1.06amps

LOAD 3DMark06 1680x1050/High Quality(Nvidia)/NO AA/NO AF = 7203 - 209Watts/1.77amps

I think I was using Vista the first tests in my previous post and these ones were in WinXP. If anyone has any ideas about how I can push my power consumption up so I can really test this out that would be great. I think my 3dmark06 score should be good enough to show that you can have a pretty damn good gaming machine without going power crazy.

Oh yeah, my 22" monitor is rated at 35watts and I have a printer, kb, mouse, 4.1 surround, and a scanner so this test is really about the core machine if anyone wants to know the total for all components during load let me know.

EDIT: Need to get this official so I can put it in the results section. Smile

True most systems do not need a 1KW PSU but isn't it better for the PSU to have a less(er) load so the lifespand of the PSU is longer?

Ex: 450W vs 700W

System Pulls: 230W
450W Load: 51%
700W Load: 33%

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Hayabusa wrote:

True most systems do not need a 1KW PSU but isn't it better for the PSU to have a less(er) load so the lifespand of the PSU is longer?

For the price of a decent KW PSU I could purchase 3 or 4 very nice Antec 550 or 650W power supplies. Smile

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I'll be honest, we're throwing science at the wall here to see what sticks. No idea what it'll do.

Hayabusa wrote:

True most systems do not need a 1KW PSU but isn't it better for the PSU to have a less(er) load so the lifespand of the PSU is longer?

Ex: 450W vs 700W

System Pulls: 230W
450W Load: 51%
700W Load: 33%

plus is that even going to matter because you'll probably have replaced your entire PC before that even comes into account

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g33x0r is mine, back off!

Hayabusa wrote:

True most systems do not need a 1KW PSU but isn't it better for the PSU to have a less(er) load so the lifespand of the PSU is longer?

No. Most power supplies are most efficient at 50-80% utilization, and that load is what they are designed to output. Running at less that 50% utilization won't make your power supply last any longer, in fact it might shorten the life as more waste heat will be generated in the larger power supply because it is running less efficiently at the same load as the smaller power supply running more efficiently.

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