MagicUK said:
cost to keep on all day 24/7 as we received are bill which is £390 for
6months and i want to know how much my comp could cost daily?
many thanks
How much it costs to run depends on 1. what power costs (probably stated as
£ per KW/Hour), 2. how much power is being consumed on average, 3. and for
how long it is being consumed.
The power consumption is highly variable. My Shuttle SB65G2 with 3gHz P4,
512mB, Plextor DVD burner, 160gB hard drive, 9600XT video is consuming 185W
as I type this. To be fair, the UPS that it is plugged into is consuming
that much power but it is also providing power to the 17" LCD monitor, a
small speaker setup, and even a 12W compact flourescent light on the desk.
And the computer is running a distributed processing weather program (CPDN
from Oxford University) which saturates the CPU doing computations. Stopping
that program leaving only normal background tasks running drops the power
consumption to < 130W.
So, I can calculate my power cost by multiplying power consumed multipled by
the number of hours and converting to KWhours and then dividing by the cost
of a single KWhour. Since power is relatively inexpensive at ~$0.07 per
KWhour where I live my Shuttle costs something like $0.31 to operate every
day.
To find out what your computer costs to run you need to know what the power
consumption is, measured or guesstimated, and what your local power provider
charges per unit.