Pavel Ferenc said:
hi,
can anybody say, what is the power consumption (in W) of a computer
which I leave on for long downloads (cca 30kb/s) 7/24? My processor is
an AMD 2,4GHz and the display is off, of course.
thanks for any help
pavel
There were some numbers collected here. The best figure was 94W
when idle, with Cool N' Quiet enabled.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/Sections+index-req-printpage-artid-293.html
When idle, Cool N' Quiet can drop the processor power quite a
bit. But there are other things in the computer that continue
to load the power bill. My experience with video cards, is
they do not reduce their power in a significant way when they
are only doing 2D. Your system power consumption could be
dominated by the video card, if you are using a high end
card. (My 9800pro only dropped the power in half or so.)
Your disk drives draw 12-13W a piece. If your hard drives are
set to spin down, then perhaps only the boot drive will still
be spinning, which is about the best you can do. (The download
is probably being stored on the boot drive.) The disk
drive controller board is probably still drawing power, but
at least the 7W draw on the 12V would be turned off, for each
drive that spins down.
Another alternative, would be to use a large amount of RAM,
and an operating system like Knoppix. Knoppix can be set up,
to load the boot CD into RAM. You could use the browser in
Knoppix to start your download, and then pop the boot CD out
of the drive. That would leave you with a computer with no
rotating media at all. At the end of the download, you could
plug in, say, a USB disk drive, to transfer the file from
RAM disk to the hard drive. That system configuration might
be suitable for a 1GB sized download.
So, you can do some things, to optimize your system power,
but in general, if you have a "gaming" setup with a high
power video card, I would not expect the computer to have
outstanding idle power characteristics.
If you pick up an old laptop, that might make a good platform
for continuous downloads.
Paul
