lower power PCs
For some time I've been using an old Dell Optiplex P3/600 for some home control and A/V functions. It is a big tower with a number of PCI and ISA cards, three older hard drives, and a CDROM. I was always pleased that it lights no LEDs on the power scale of the 1000VA UPS to which it is attached.
I wanted a little more CPU power to allow for some MPEG transcoding so I'm replacing the Optiplex with a more modern P4/3GHz machine with two recent hard drives, a DVDR and an FX5200 video card. (Everything else is on the ASUS P4C motherboard. This "new" machine is a few years old, but much newer than the Dell.)
I was a little disturbed that the "new" machine lit two LEDs on the UPS, so I got out my genuine glass-cased watt-hour meter. Turns out that the old Dell draws about 60W while the new machine draws 140W. Ok, I realize the "new" machine is a lot faster but I thought efficiency improvements had at least somewhat offset this. Am I being unrealistic or should I be able to do better?
Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com
read more and respond »Posted 5 years ago by Dan Lanciani in General Home Automation
