[stopdrpnro]

my mom is always yelling and complaining about me leavin the computer on when i'm not on it . says it's killin her electric bill, think there's any thuth to that?anybody know how much actaul power my computer burns?any formula i can use to find out ? (specs in sig)

[couchpotato]

I have read that the 1600 xp uses 62 Watt (look at www.benchtest.com)
The overclocked one of yours is probably 70Watt.
As a guess - overnight using a 90% efficient PSU and no other load
(folding ) we get 77 Watt MINIMUM - without factoring in the stand-by
load of the rest of the system.
As a bigger guess - reality is probably equivalent to a 100 Watt bulb. Not
to be sniffed at (unless you're my neighbour who leaves a 500Watt external
floodlight on ever night).
At this time of night I don't do cost per quarter calcs.

OK ?

[Crazymofo]

well there is this meter you can get at radio shack that will tell you how much power the device is using... it plugs into the wall then you plug the computer into the meter... tell it how much the power company charges per kwh and it calculates how much it will cost...

A computer running 24/7 folding costs about $10 - $15 a month... thats a stripped down comp just doing nothing but folding. No monitor no optical drives... but the CPU is at full load 24/7 so I figure yours is idle most of the time which will consume less power.

Parents tend to care about 10 bucks so I would say her point is valid from her point of view...

[PLtNmHeLiX]

Irrelevant, but show her that it's not the computer by turning on a lamp in the closet or something during the times you have your computer off and it'll be baout the same

[skab]

I don't know if this is the right way to do this but if you don.t get anything as a link he address should work,

http://team.macnn.com/faq.phtml

How much energy is wasted by running all these distributed computing clients?
Assuming each CPU is left on for 24 hours a day (the worst case calculation), and that the average CPU consumes 50 watts of power (just the CPU - no monitors or peripherals), the monthly power usage will be 36.5 KW hours. If the average home electric bill is in the 700 KWh range, then one CPU would contribute only 5% to the electric bill in question. If electricity is charged at 10 cents per KWh, then the monthly cost would be US$3.65.

On a larger scale, calculations suggest that a distributed computing project running on 100,000 clients will produce only 0.0001% of the world's carbon dioxide production per year.

These calculations were done for the "average" CPU - that means a PC. Macs on average use less power, so should have a smaller impact. Also, the computer was presumably going to be on during some of this time anyway. In the case of a server, the computer was going to be running 24/7, so the extra power to run a distributed client would be minimal.

- data source: climateprediction.org faq

[josi]

My system (specs in the sig) consumes about 160W/h (or 236W/h with 17" CRT monitor turned on). Results had measured by two different tariff meters while I developed some software for local electricity company

[Stedeman]

You can get some ruff numbers here www.pcpowercooling.com/maxpc/index_cases.htm