The Power "Cost" Of High Performance Gaming Rigs.

[Stu @ MSD]

Hi Guys,
Bought a new toy today and thought you might like to see some results I got from it.

Its just another in wall power adapter that reads out Watts, but its unique in that it has the LCD display on a cable so you can monitor it on your desk. far more usefull than getting down on my hands and knees everytime I want to see what sort of power draw I am generating.
(I do this to estimate what Clocks/Volts I can get away with on benchmarks by the way... the more power it draws, the closer my cards are to OCP )

More interestingly, it lets you input the current cost of your elctricity in pence per KWh and then tells you what it will cost to run this appliance for 30 days / 1 year. That got me to wondering what this rig costs to run.... I now know, and thought you might like to know too.

Anyway, I digress...
Just to ensure its as accurate as my old one, I plugged them in together... no problems there as you can see.



Then I decided to do some tests.

Sleep mode. Under £1 per month.


Idling with speedstep disabled. £22.37p per month. 3p per hour.


Folding @ home with 3x GPU's £63.37p per month. 9 per hour.


Carbon footprint per month for your folders out there.


Running 3D Mark Fire Strike with 1 GPU £46.32 per month. 6p per hour.


Running 3D Mark Fire Strike with 2 GPU £74.02 per month. 10p per hour.


Running 3D Mark Fire Strike with 3 GPU £102 per month. 14p per hour.

 

[Stu @ MSD]

And finally, just for the hell of it, running kombuster at the max it will do, with all shaders etc on and the cards fully overclocked to 1275/1950 with 1.290v / 1.800v just to see how much power this thing could draw in a worst case scenario....





£135 per month! Jees.. you could buy a car on HP for that!

So there you go... of course these figures mean absolutely sod all as nobody benchmarks 24hrs a day, but its usefull to see how the extra GPU's dont just cost you the purchase price, they have a running cost too. I guess the folding figure might be of interest to folk though as a lot of you guys really do that 24hrs a day.

Its also worth noting that I have 3 monitors that are not part of the above equasion as they are all powered from another spur.
Hmm.. come to think of it, so are the printers, the backup NAS and my Raid Server. Oh... and my laptop, second PC and a few other PC bits.
Nice cheap hobby this isnt it? LOL

 

[lehtv]

Nice findings. Did you test idling with speedstep ON? That'd be the thing most computers do most of the time they're powered on.

 

[Ken g6]

of course these figures mean absolutely sod all as nobody benchmarks 24hrs a day

Have you visited the Distributed Computing forum lately? Of course, most of us don't have 3 GPUs - at least not all in one box.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Better not let my housemate see this. She already freaks enough about the utility bill. If she knew what chunk of it was me... oh god...

 

[Torn Mind]

What PSU is in the rig you're testing?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Have you visited the Distributed Computing forum lately? Of course, most of us don't have 3 GPUs - at least not all in one box.

Speak for yourself. I used to have four 9600GSO cards in one box. It was fairly powerful a few years back for F@H.

Now I only have two cards in that box, it started to crash with all four running. I suspect the mid-grade 800W PSU is failing.

 

[Charlie98]

Thats a pretty cool unit... I bought a Kill-O-Watt to see what my rigs were drawing and got so carried away I started testing everything in the house, just about. It's kind of neat to be able to put a dollar (etc...) figure to it.

 

[Stu @ MSD]

Nice findings. Did you test idling with speedstep ON? That'd be the thing most computers do most of the time they're powered on.

No mate, this is by benching drive so everything is setup for max stability.
As an aside, I wonder how many people dont realise that setting windows power scheme to "Performance" disables speed step and costs them hunderds per year? LOL

Have you visited the Distributed Computing forum lately? Of course, most of us don't have 3 GPUs - at least not all in one box.

No mate, what is that?

What PSU is in the rig you're testing?

XFX 1250w Pro black edition.
Will be upgraded tday to the Enermax Max Revo 1500w that should be delivered any second.

 

[Stu @ MSD]

I have updated the OP to show hourly consumption as its more relevant and usefull.

 

[scragnoff]

Great post! Very informative.