Interesting power usage findings for all us DC'ers to look at.

[muddocktor]

Hey guys,

You might want to check out some power usage figures I have come up with for various systems while running Rosetta that you might be interested in (especially farmers). c627627 started this thread here (http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=677404) in the Intel CPU forum titled "Do our computer systems really cost all that much to run?". Since I have a kill-a-watt and I'm a farmer, I decided to do little checking on my various systems and what it actually costs to keep the farm going per month. I checked my various systems and recorded the power usage with Rosetta running and then with Rosetta and a 640x 480 windowed session of Furmark running, to simulate GPU folding or crunching along with CPU crunching and came up with my numbers in this post (http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6870872&postcount=50). I also checked my window unit power usage too, since this is also needed to keep things running down here in soggy bottom La. to curb the temps in my computer room from my farm. Then this morning I pulled out my last electric bill and figured up how much it costs me per month to crunch Rosetta and the results are listed in this post (http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6872442&postcount=58) in the thread.

Those results are an eye opener is the power usage differences I have seen with the different platforms. And the most surprising to me is the power usage of the 2600K system I have crunching, which is even lower than my old QX9650 system while running at 500 more MHz than it. So if your significant other is giving you lip about an upgrade, you can always pull the "But it will save us on the electric bill" argument on them and be able to back it with hard numbers. :D

Anyway, fold or crunch on you all.:cool:

mudd

[Adak]

Thanks for the info!

The other side of this is the electric rate itself that we're being billed at. As long as the Fed's are heavily restricting oil and gas drilling and refining, the cost for electricity will have to rise, as people use it more, yet at the same time, restricting/stopping efforts to build new hydroelectric dams, or nuclear, or coal burning power plants.

When (if) electric rates skyrocket, as Obama has stated they will under his energy plan, that will be the end of the distributed computing projects as we know them, now. Then it will be "$ per cpu hour of folding time", or just a lot less participation. Three hundred dollars per year in extra electric fees, is one thing. Three hundred dollars per month, every month, would require some significant downtime. Five hundred dollars per month means the systems just don't fold without being reimbursed by the project, month by month.

After the CC race, and all the other high performance folding/crunching, May will be an electric bill I will not like seeing.