P4 upgrade power efficiency.

I just finished upgrading my daughter's computer last night from the following:

Abit IS7
4 X 512 MB DDR
P4 2.6C Northwood, overclocked to 3250 with 1.7v vcore

This machine is plugged into an APC UPS (Back-UPS XS1500) along with an Opteron cruncher and with both machines crunching the digital readout on the UPS was reading 305 watts power being pulled. That is with both machines just basically crunching, with no gaming or other activity.

I upgraded this machine to the following last night:

Gigabyte GA-P35 DS3R
2 X 1GB OCZ plat PC2-7200 EL
C2D E6300, presently at 3360 with 1.36v vcore

All other aspects of the machine remained the same, even the video card (I have a temp pci card in for now) and with both machines crunching on the UPS, I am now showing a total load of around 315 watts. So, for a significant upgrade in both crunching power and also for general usage I'm only seeing a power usage gain of 10 watts or so. And this is with a processor that is highly overclocked too. When I was ramping it up last night I had it at around 3 GHZ and only saw a load of 295 watts on the UPS. And for that 10 watts of extra power usage I'm seeing now, I will see the RAC from that machine more than double.

For cooling both setups I am using watercooling with a Storm and Eheim 1250 pump with a DTek Pro radiator, with no changes in the loop. Loaded temps between the 2 setups is minimal, with the E6300 presently running in the 42-43 C range while crunching. With the P4 setup, temps were generally the same, maybe 1-2 C lower at most.

Anyways, just thought I'd post this up so that it gives you another reason to upgrade the old rig.

Oh wicked. Grats Muddy. It just goes to show how much technology has advanced since the northwood days

Interesting info - THANKS!


But I'll stick to my Opty's for now ...

I tell you what, the Opty on that UPS surprised me on how little power it actually draws from the UPS, QuietIce. I shut down the Conroe for a while and checked power usage and the Opty was drawing around 165-170 watts according to the UPS numbers. I would have thought it would be drawing more than that, since it's overclocked to around 2650 or so right now.

I was pretty surprised, too, when I looked at some of my numbers. An FX-55 OC'ed to 3.0 GHz in a POS motherboard only pulled 110w. The big set-up isn't as surprising - a pair of Opty's including all the bells and whistles of my main rig plus 2 pumps and a pair of monster Delta's (on one heater core) to cool them adds up to almost 400w ...