Your way off about power costs, and I am very familiar with the electric utilities also.
How many hours a day to figure people game/full load. 1 hour a day ? 365 days a year ?
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html
Its practically nothing. I just changed my bathroom vanities and went from 3-60 watt bulbs to 4-60 watt bulbs.
I know that will effect my bill more, than 25 watts at full gaming load.
??
Show me how my math is wrong? Note I was calculating idle power draw differentials, not load, which is what you seem to be thinking. Re-read what I wrote. It was Happy who talked about load only; I talked about idle AND load.
As for 24/7 usage, I know lots of people who leave their PCs on 24/7. Personally I don't (surprise, surprise), which is why I didn't think TOO much about it when I was weighing each card's price/perf. The GTX460-1GB vs. HD6850 price difference is more like $5-10 for someone with my usage habits.
But different people have different habits, different # of hours they game, different efficiencies in PSUs, and different electricity costs, which is why I didn't want to get too much into that in the first post of this thread. I mentioned power but didn't make a big deal out of it until Happy went off on me a few posts ago. He was wrong about how much power can cost, so I corrected him. That's all. And you can correct me if *I* am wrong, too. Show me the math, though.
Your light bulb thing is a false argument because you can save the same amount of power whether you use a GTX460 or HD6850. Or can you *only* switch to more-efficient appliances if you own a GTX460?
P.S. If your argument is more that you should concentrate on higher-potential-savings appliances first, I agree with you. But $17 is significant compared to the cost of a midrange video card and thus can alter price/performance ratios, which is what we were talking about in this thread. If we want to change the thread topic to something else, we can (perhaps by creating another thread in another forum), but I'm just talking about video card price/performance factoring in power costs.
And if you want retail residential power prices rather than a map, try:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
Note the avg in't weighted by population. Looking at the big-pop states (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population) it could be more than 12.01 cents/kWh; if you care enough you can run the #s for us for ALL states, weighted by pop.
top 10 states by pop:
population (MM=million) state cents/kwh
37MM ca 15.52
25MM tx 11.99
19.5MM ny 19.58
18.5MM fl 11.68
13MM il 12.00
12.5MM pa 13.34
11.5MM oh 11.72
10MM mi 12.86
10MM ga 10.85
9.5MM nc 10.41
Eyeballing it though you can see the little states pay less on avg:
http://www.green-energy-efficient-homes.com/how-much-does-electricity-cost.html
Note also that we're in a huge recession and thus input costs are lower than they were in 2008 prior to the recession start, thus these numbers may look low once the recession lifts.