Anyone practice "seasonal" computing?

[VirtualLarry]

Doing DC in the winter, selling off the big rigs in the spring, buying power-sipping computers for the summer, and then selling them off in the fall, and purchasing whatever the newest heavy-duty rig is for winter again?

Yeah, sounds wasteful, doesn't it.

 

[chubbyfatazn]

Too much work involved. It's not like I'm mining 24/7 on my machines, they're probably idle most of the time.

Plus, no guarantee that I can sell off my old hardware. And if there was I'd still probably lose enough money to offset whatever savings realised from the reduced power draw.

I'm in Texas.

 

[DominionSeraph]

No. I only practice seasonal undervolting.

 

[Lonyo]

Cost you more money than just running one computer year round.

 

[BrightCandle]

The minimal amount you might save in power this way will be dramatically offset by the cost of the computers themselves.

 

[Maximilian]

No, I enjoy the heat my rig kicks out in the summer and the winter. Might have something to do with Scotland being fooking freezing a good chunk of the time though :|

Instead I waste money on overkill hardware like the 3930k I used to have, it played league of legends and surfed the web :thumbsup:

 

[bononos]

Doing DC in the winter, selling off the big rigs in the spring, buying power-sipping computers for the summer, and then selling them off in the fall, and purchasing whatever the newest heavy-duty rig is for winter again?

Yeah, sounds wasteful, doesn't it.

Why didn't you get an AMD FX, would've kept you covered for a few years and more.

 

[BSim500]

Doing DC in the winter, selling off the big rigs in the spring, buying power-sipping computers for the summer, and then selling them off in the fall, and purchasing whatever the newest heavy-duty rig is for winter again?

There's zero point. If you buy new each time isn't there Sales Tax / VAT involved? Then when you sell, EBay / Paypal takes a combined +10% cut in fees. Put together, that's almost 15-30% "tax" per buy/sell cycle (depending on which country you live), which dwarfs any financial savings. For other reasons, eg, heat reduction in summer, below a certain idle point efficiency level (eg, 40-50w), your own body is generating twice the BTU's that your PC is, and other stuff like window awnings / shades / window films / window air-con is far more efficient at preventing summer room heat build-up than swapping a Haswell for an Atom. It's primarily AMD FX CPU's & high end GPU's that chuck out the heat, not idling Haswell's. Likewise for "green-ness" going through a new PC every 6 months is far less "green" (in terms of energy / resources consumed during manufacturing process plus energy consumed during transportation of new components / mailing old ones) than building a high end "green" rig then keeping it for as long as possible.

If you build a powerful "green" PC based around an i5, you pretty much eliminate every problem and would run around 25-40w idle & max 100-140w CPU + dGPU full load. I can get my i5-3570 down to 25-26w idle iGPU (or 36-37w inc 7870 dGPU). Even under Prime it doesn't break 90w load. Web-browsing, etc, under 45w. Those are "at the wall" full system measurement including PSU losses. No point selling such a rig for a 15w Atom that takes 4x longer under load to do the same task. Eg:-

i5 = 5w Idle / 60w Load. Speed 100%
Atom = 2w Idle / 12w Load. Speed 25% (of i5)

The i5 looks "inefficient" because it uses 5x the load (and 2.5x the idle) power of an Atom - BUT - If it takes 20mins for the Atom to complete a task, it may take only 5mins for an i5 to complete same task, which then idle's (or even suspends to S3 after say a batch conversion) for the next 15mins whilst the Atom is still under load. i5 (5mins x 60w + 15mins x 5w) uses only 56% more energy used per task than Atom (12w x 20mins), not 400% as the (60w CPU vs 12w CPU) load rating alone suggests. Factor in other "total power consumption" (eg, add 35w for a 24" monitor for both) and the gap closes even more : (5mins x 95w + 15mins x 40w) vs (20mins x 47w) falls to only 14% difference in i5 vs Atom total power consumed per task.

Ditching a "green big core" rig for an Atom is a false economy as 55-60w CPU's like an i3 / undervolted i5 do not actually use 3-5x more power per task in the real world than 14-18w Atom's since they get the job done in half to quarter the time drawing more power early on then spend the other half drawing less power in idle state ("hurry up and wait" philosophy).

If you're that concerned over the last watt / extreme "green-ness", then it sounds more like you need a separate laptop / tablet for regular web browsing and only plug in and boot your main rig up for "heavy" work? Either that or once and for all ditch all your current rigs, and go all out and build a "green i5" rig (eg, i5-4670S, undervolt it, get a Seasonic G360 PSU (lowest wattage Gold PSU), get an nVidia 750Ti (and undervolt that using TRIXX), 8GB 1.35v LOVO RAM, use SSD's or 2.5" 5,400 rpm drives (not 7,200rpm 3.5"), etc, then just keep it for the next 3-5 years and stop worrying.

 

[Phynaz]

Not only seasonal, but daily here. It was 93 degrees here yesterday, I was not doing video work or gaming yesterday. A much more comfortable 72 today so I'll get some editing in. I do not like sitting and sweating in an island of heat given off by a system.

 

[Ken g6]

No. I only practice seasonal undervolting.

This, plus I have two video cards. A big GTX 460 for winter, and a small GT430 for summer. (I need a full system upgrade soon.)

@BrightCandle, it's not about money for me, it's about comfort. My air conditioning isn't that good.

 

[nerp]

I invested in high efficiency equipment for my central air and gas heating systems at home. I think that's where the payoff is.

 

[Rakehellion]

Doing DC in the winter, selling off the big rigs in the spring, buying power-sipping computers for the summer, and then selling them off in the fall, and purchasing whatever the newest heavy-duty rig is for winter again?

Yeah, sounds wasteful, doesn't it.

Yeah, it does.

 

[Rakehellion]

The minimal amount you might save in power this way will be dramatically offset by the cost of the computers themselves.

It's kind of like the person who drives an extra 30 minutes to save 5 cents on gas.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

It's kind of like the person who drives an extra 30 minutes to save 5 cents on gas.

I think it was Frank Knight who observed that companies who developed their market through advertising were essentially "creating demand" where there might otherwise not be any.

We desperately depend on the availability of gasoline or foodstuffs; we moderately learn to depend on the latest incarnation of something only dreamt of by Charles Babbage or Mary Shelley.

I had a friend who had a small computer store, near the intersection of three major thoroughfares. [The traffic lights seemed complicated and stressful.] He sold computers in the window, and parts indoors. On his desk, was a huge pile of screws, stand-offs, and other minutiae familiar mostly to forum members.

In the back, he had a big pile of computer waste, all sorted into piles.

That was part of his business.

This isn't new. They refer to it as "planned obsolescence," or "the throw-away society."

Given the number of uses to which you might put one (or more computers) -- when you run out of uses for them, you will see the pickle you're in. By that time, you'd had them long enough that a time-stream of value following the simple depreciation of the parts had ended.

If you begin to see it otherwise, you will simply reduce your flow of purchases.

From the view of corporate person-hood, that's not a good idea, either.

Do you remember, though, the ISA, the EISA, the PCI and PCI-E evolution? This design hinged on just the mere promise of more versatile usage.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Sorry about this -- don't know what I was thinking. I returned to the computer and the editing window still showed a blank with Rak's quote.

It's kind of like the person who drives an extra 30 minutes to save 5 cents on gas.

Your long-term economic behavior will adjust to the mistakes you make in the short-run.

I had a friend who owned a hole-in-the-wall computer store three doors down from the intersection of three thoroughfares, making the traffic lights a bit more complicated. He sold computers in the window, parts in the store. On his cash-register counter, there was a huge pile of screws, standoffs, switches -- all the paraphernalia familiar to all forum members.

In the back room, he had junk parts stacked neatly in various piles: circuit-boards, cases, disk-drives. The recycling out the back door was part of his front-door business.

 

[janeuner]

I practice seasonal DC computing in software only.

/etc/cron.monthly/speedset:

#!/bin/bash

month=`date +%m`

case $month in
0[4-9])
  freq=`cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_min_freq`
  ;;
*)
  freq=`cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_max_freq`
  ;;
esac

for i in cpu0 cpu1 cpu2 cpu3; do
  echo $freq > /sys/devices/system/cpu/$i/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq;
done

Do that and stick...

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load

...in a startup file and you are set.