How do you figure out how much power your PC uses?

[InlineFive]

I am trying to figure out how much my comps cost to run every month. Can someone help me with this and tell me how to do it? Let's start with my main rig...

Athlon XP 3200+
Abit NF7-S
512MB OCZ Performance Series DDR
Radeon 9600 Pro
LiteOn LDW-401S DVD+RW
Maxtor DiamondMax 9+ 80GB
Cooler Master 80mm BlueLED Fan (Qty. 2)
Panaflo M1A 92mm Fan (Qty. 1)
Fortron FSP350-60NP (350w)
Viewsonic VP171b 17" LCD
25w Speakers
Keyboard and Mouse

Thank you!

-Por

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Do you crunch 24/7? Do you run games occasionally? Do you just use it as a web browser?

Power consumption varies heavily by usage, but since you've got an LCD, you've eliminated a major source of energy draw there.

- M4H

 

[InlineFive]

It runs SETI@Home in the background 24/7 when it's not too hot. Other then that I might play UT2k4 for an hour or so every day. After those I mainly surf the web and do email.

-Por

 

[mechBgon]

To begin with, you could take a guess at the system's actual electrical consumption, on average. Let's say that the system averaged 200 watts. That's 0.2 kilowatt. Multiply by number of hours per day that it's running, and you get kW-hours. I don't know what a kW-hr of electricity costs in your region so let's say 10 cents.

0.2kW x 24hr x $0.10/kw-hr = $0.48 per day or about $15 per month.

If it's cold out and you would be heating your home/apartment anyway, then this can be considered electric heat (right M4H? 😀) and deducted from what you would be paying to heat the home by other means.

If it's hot out, and you need to use air conditioning to remove some or all of the PC's heat production from the home, then multiply the cost by about a factor of 2 or 3, since heat pumps are far from 100% efficient.

The main assumption is what the actual electrical consumption is, of course, and the best way to determine that would be to seal up the running system in a "bomb" and determine it calorimetrically, but that is not very practicible.


Bigger picture: worry more about your refrigerator and electric hot-water heater.

 

[Fern]

Hey Por, looks like you got your answer above. But maybe this link will be helpful. It specifies (peak?) power usage per indiviual component.

Link to PC Wattage calculator