OT: Bios / power saving features...

[RJK]

....also seperateley posted in hardware i.e. cross posted to wrong NG

A few weeks ago I switched on "Intel Speedstep" in my "old" main PC's bios,
and selected XP's "Mininal Power Management" scheme,
and tweaked other settings for ages to find out what the best settings were,
to get the most of this "power saving" feature,
closely watching various motherboard frequencies with CPU-Z, and Hot CPU
Tester Pro etc. to keep an eye on what was going on with motherboard
frequencies.
(Asrock Conroe865pe|D935|4xCorsair512mbPC3200/ddr400|3 hard disks|Seasonic
430wSII psu|2xDVD drives|card reader etc.)

And also around that time, for my 2nd PC, I downloaded AMD's
dualcoreoptimizer.exe, processordriver.exe, and powermonitor.exe, and
installed them, and switched on its' "Cool'n'Quiet" feature, and selected
XP's "Mininal Power Management" scheme, and tried various bios
configurations to determine which was the "best" set-up. i.e. certain
settings have to be on "Auto" or cpu will not drop to a lower frequency
whilst idling.
(Asrock AliveNF6G|6000 2x3.0ghz|2x512mbPC2-5300|2 hds'|1xDVD drives|card
reader|Seasonic 380wSII | etc,

....and tonight, just out of interest, I plugged my TCM mains power "guage"
in (UK 240 volts btw), and my {AMD PC+monitor+11 watt desklamp}, into it, to
see what they were using, and was ATONISHED to note the difference in mains
power consumption, between "idling" with cpu at 1ghz, and making the thing
do a lot of work i.e. cpu working at 3ghz -

73 watts whilst cpu idling, and 131 watts with cpu under load !!! Surely
that's good, ...but, also a little ridiculous ?

regards, Richard

ps before someone gets clever - that cheap plug in "mains power guage" is
pretty accurate i.e. current drawn in amps matches a pretty accurate
ammeter.

 

[Anteaus]

It is my experience that manufacturers of all electronic devices (for some
unknown reason) overstate the power usage by a very large margin. Thus, a PC
with a "500W" rating doesn't use anything like that. In your case 150W or
less even without processor-idling mode working, less still with it working.

 

[RJK]

Hi, You're right about the "overstating," ...there is a simple formula
somewhere in the rails/amps sticker usually on the side of psu's i.e. amps
are all rounded up and averaged out to give a rating somehow, ...read about
it a long time ago - can't remember even half of it !!
....rely on Antec.com's wattage calculator nowadays

regards, Richard

 

[Bill in Co.]

Hi, You're right about the "overstating," ...there is a simple formula
somewhere in the rails/amps sticker usually on the side of psu's i.e. amps
are all rounded up and averaged out to give a rating somehow, ..
read about it a long time ago - can't remember even half of it !!
...rely on Antec.com's wattage calculator nowadays

P = VI (voltage x current) (for each output). But what's specified on the
side is the *rated* (maximum) current, not the actual current used, which
depends on the current drawn by the computer.

The same basic comment applies to the power RATING of the supply, vs the
actual power used by the supply, which is generally much less.

 

[RJK]

P = VI (voltage x current) (for each output). But what's specified on
the side is the *rated* (maximum) current, not the actual current used,
which depends on the current drawn by the computer.

The same basic comment applies to the power RATING of the supply, vs the
actual power used by the supply, which is generally much less.