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The Power "Cost" Of High Performance Gaming Rigs.

Stu
Level 10
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. 9p 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.


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 or 18p per hour.! 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

Asus Maximus IV Extreme Z
i7 3770K @ 4.4ghz
AMD 7970 HD x3 in TriFire @ 1200/1800.
2x 240GHZ OCZ Vertex 3 SSD & 1x 512Gb Vertex 4
16GB 2133mhz Patriot DDR3
Ennermax Max Revo 1500w PSU
Huge water loop with an internal EK 340mm & external Supernova 1260mm
Windows 7 64 bit.

Aquaero Fan control & monitoring
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13 REPLIES 13

HalloweenWeed
Level 12
And you have a 1250W PSU? That's pretty incredible, that you get 1462W draw from that. Even figuring a 10% loss, that's 1329W in use by your computer. And that's not considering the imbalance between the voltages, i.e. watts @ 3.3V + watts @ 12V. I'd say you are very lucky your PSU does this. Maybe get a 1500W next time? I'd imagine that one is not going to keep doing that for long.

But thanx for the info, appreciate it.
i7-3930K; Asus RIVE; G.SKILL Ripjaws Z 4x4GB DDR3 1866; MSI 7870 2GD5/OC; Crucial M4 SSD 256GB;
Corsair 1000HX; Corsair H100, 4x Excalibur 120mm PWM CPU Fan p-p, AS5; SB X-Fi Titanium Fata1ity Pro;
Dell U2412m IPS 1920x1200; Cooler Master HAF 932 case; Tripp-Lite OMNIVS1500 UPS fully Line-interactive.
(EVGA site: ) And I have a second (wife's) computer, Eve.

Overclocking is useless to me if it is not rock stable.

HalloweenWeed wrote:
And you have a 1250W PSU? That's pretty incredible, that you get 1462W draw from that. Even figuring a 10% loss, that's 1329W in use by your computer. And that's not considering the imbalance between the voltages, i.e. watts @ 3.3V + watts @ 12V. I'd say you are very lucky your PSU does this. Maybe get a 1500W next time? I'd imagine that one is not going to keep doing that for long.

But thanx for the info, appreciate it.


Totally agree. Just shows how far out the "Recommended" PSU specs can be when you start benching hard with extra volts.
I have already ordered the Enermax 1500 max Revo. It will be here tomorrow. 🙂

Asus Maximus IV Extreme Z
i7 3770K @ 4.4ghz
AMD 7970 HD x3 in TriFire @ 1200/1800.
2x 240GHZ OCZ Vertex 3 SSD & 1x 512Gb Vertex 4
16GB 2133mhz Patriot DDR3
Ennermax Max Revo 1500w PSU
Huge water loop with an internal EK 340mm & external Supernova 1260mm
Windows 7 64 bit.

Aquaero Fan control & monitoring

Zka17
Level 16
He-he... did you really need that toy? 🙂 Now, you will feel bad every time you turn on PC... 😄

I have a UPS which has a built in wattage meter... it's a 1500VA/900W one... - I almost jumped out of my skin when first time started to beep because of overload... it was past midnight when I finished building a 3xGTX480 setup, then I wanted to try it... 😄

But, as it was stated before: you're not using your rig non-stop... at least I don't... - usually it BSOD's well before... 🙂 (I'm just pushing the clocks and benching)

xeromist
Moderator
During the F@H contests here people had power bills running into the hundreds of dollars OVER their normal usage. So it's not really surprising but that was for multiple computers running full tilt with some people churning 400K+ PPD. The average person won't see much difference from F@H.
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…

Zka17 wrote:
He-he... did you really need that toy? 🙂 Now, you will feel bad every time you turn on PC... :Dd before:


Its well worth £20.
I use it to quickly esitimate what I can set the GPU's voltage to for benching. For example, 3DM11 only draws about 850w so I know I can run the core at around 1250. However, Firestrike draws around 1200w and that leads me to hover around 1175 otherwise I clip the OCP.

Asus Maximus IV Extreme Z
i7 3770K @ 4.4ghz
AMD 7970 HD x3 in TriFire @ 1200/1800.
2x 240GHZ OCZ Vertex 3 SSD & 1x 512Gb Vertex 4
16GB 2133mhz Patriot DDR3
Ennermax Max Revo 1500w PSU
Huge water loop with an internal EK 340mm & external Supernova 1260mm
Windows 7 64 bit.

Aquaero Fan control & monitoring

chrsplmr
Level 18
Yikes ! WoW ! and oh Crap !!! ... and I've been 'yell'n' at the kids to turn off lights. Thanks.c.

chrsplmr wrote:
and I've been 'yell'n' at the kids to turn off lights. Thanks.c.


LOL... that brightened up an otherwise crap morning, thanks pal. 🙂

Asus Maximus IV Extreme Z
i7 3770K @ 4.4ghz
AMD 7970 HD x3 in TriFire @ 1200/1800.
2x 240GHZ OCZ Vertex 3 SSD & 1x 512Gb Vertex 4
16GB 2133mhz Patriot DDR3
Ennermax Max Revo 1500w PSU
Huge water loop with an internal EK 340mm & external Supernova 1260mm
Windows 7 64 bit.

Aquaero Fan control & monitoring

Stu
Level 10
I have updated the OP to show hourly figures as well as those are far more meaningful.

Asus Maximus IV Extreme Z
i7 3770K @ 4.4ghz
AMD 7970 HD x3 in TriFire @ 1200/1800.
2x 240GHZ OCZ Vertex 3 SSD & 1x 512Gb Vertex 4
16GB 2133mhz Patriot DDR3
Ennermax Max Revo 1500w PSU
Huge water loop with an internal EK 340mm & external Supernova 1260mm
Windows 7 64 bit.

Aquaero Fan control & monitoring

TenBlade
Level 11
Stu @ MSD wrote:
Hi Guys,
Bought a new toy today and thought you might like to see some results I got from it.

...

Nice cheap hobby this isnt it? LOL


It´s why I call my hobby "The Money Pit". Nice gadget, though I prefer to live in blissfull unawareness :rolleyes:
Wouldn´t show this to my wife either "look, honey, now you can calculate the TOTAL cost of my seemingly endless spending spree..." 😉
Thanks for sharing, though, makes one think...where´s my Guinness to put my guilt ridden mind at ease?!!!