View Single Post
Old 03-23-21, 11:20 PM   #19
Daox
Administrator
 
Daox's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Germantown, WI
Posts: 5,525
Thanks: 1,162
Thanked 374 Times in 305 Posts
Default

I've been playing with the new to me computer setup and am quite happy with it. Performance is definitely superior and power consumption is light years ahead of the older computer despite only being 2 years newer technology (2010 vs 2012).

After some tweaking, I was able to get idle power consumption down to about 28W. All the readings were taken via a killawatt from the wall, so it is total system power draw. Here is the process I went through:

stock idle - 33W
unplug DVD drive - 31W
swap out bronze 500W to 350W gold rated power supply - 29W
add wifi card - 29W
add HDD - 29-30W

I then started to undervolt the processor. It did quite a great job and is pretty stable at -.18V though I think I may need to increase that to -.17V. My wife mentioned it crashed once on her today. But, all these settings were tested with a cinebench run.
-.03V - 29W
-.05V - 29W
-.10V - 29W
-.15V - 28W
-.18V - 28W
-.20V - crash

While poking around in the bios for undervolting, I also increased the sleep state from S1 to S3 and went from 26W sleeping down to 2W when sleeping.

Finally, I did also monitor power usage while benchmarking in cinebench. At stock it was using about 82W. After the undervolting it dropped it down quite a bit to 70W with the same performance. I did not underclock it, but its possible I could get power consumption down even further. Of course this would sacrifice performance.

I am very happy with these results. The old computer idled around 100W and the new one now runs about 28W at idle. So, the new computer uses less power at full load than the old one did while idling! Also, if my wife leaves the computer on by accident (which is rare), its not guzzling power all night long.

I also did take a months worth of power usage and it really isn't a ton. In the past 30ish days her old computer used about 9 kWh. I'll probably throw the killawatt on it and check the new one in a month.
__________________
Current project -
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 0 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.



To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 0 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
&
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 0 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
Daox is offline   Reply With Quote