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How much power am I drawing - BA awaits

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  • Power Supplies
  • Power
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a c 144 ) Power supply
February 28, 2014 9:06:59 AM

This is simply a test of your knowledge of power usage by a system (described in detail below). I am monitoring this system with a Kill A Watt and will verify it's readings with two different UPS's before posting the correct draw from the wall (maximum draw the Kill A Watt reports) and selecting the best answer for the closest estimation (guess?). You are allowed to use any means possible to come up with your answer - the closest (without being under, that doesn't help) gets the BA and if you're exact, I'll have to find some trinket to throw your way for sure.

Here's the system: Stock speeds except where mentioned
Core i7 4770k
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H
2 x 4 GB GSkill Ripjaws Z @ 2133MHz 1.5v
Sapphire HD7970 Dual-X GPU (only one)
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB
WD Caviar Black 1 TB
Asus Blu-Ray reader (always idle)
Swiftech MCP35X
3 x 140mm fans
2 x 120mm fans
SeaSonic X650
USB keyboard and mouse
The system runs at ~100% draw from CPU and GPU 24/7

Take a stab at this... it'll be fun (and most hopefully, informative) and remember, I'm looking for the maximum the Kill A Watt reports I draw from the wall
BA will be selected on or before 3/13/14 (and if someone gets it right away, I ain't telling until then!)

edited 2/28 to include drives

More about : power drawing awaits

a b ) Power supply
February 28, 2014 9:17:20 AM

at 100% you can look at about 500-600 watts being sucked out of the wall.
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February 28, 2014 9:25:29 AM

628

But you didn't post your harddrives so I had to guess.
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a c 144 ) Power supply
February 28, 2014 9:57:11 AM

Alec Mowat said:
628

But you didn't post your harddrives so I had to guess.


Good point - I shall edit the specs... knew I was forgetting something that drew some power...

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a b ) Power supply
February 28, 2014 10:10:02 AM

685.
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a c 144 ) Power supply
March 1, 2014 12:48:28 PM

Interesting so far, I figured there would be more and a wider variety of responses... hmmm
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a c 1218 ) Power supply
March 1, 2014 2:14:30 PM

What utility or application is being run to place the load on the CPU and GPU?

Is reading from or writing to the HDD and/or SSD occurring during this measurement?
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a c 144 ) Power supply
March 1, 2014 4:06:20 PM

ko888 said:
What utility or application is being run to place the load on the CPU and GPU?

Is reading from or writing to the HDD and/or SSD occurring during this measurement?


Seti@home with 100% loads enabled and hyperthreading. (OpenCL on graphics)

HDD stores and retrieves SETI data (7 day buffer), SSD is OS only.
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a c 144 ) Power supply
March 2, 2014 2:16:56 PM

@ko888 in considering your question here, I thought perhaps Seti@home might not be hitting 100% on everything at the same time. So I ran some stress tests too... Unigine Heaven, Prime95, SuperPi all stand alone and with all running at once (that really sucked for scoring). It turns out, I got another 10W more from the wall, whoohoo
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a c 1218 ) Power supply
March 2, 2014 2:35:38 PM

What about Intel Burn Test and FurMark Stability Test at the same time?
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a c 144 ) Power supply
March 2, 2014 4:44:26 PM

ko888 said:
What about Intel Burn Test and FurMark Stability Test at the same time?


Not a big fan of FurMark but what the hell, IBT and Furmark it shall be. I figure I'll do OCCT also. I think I'm at my peak draw but I'm game to any combos that may stress things more (no, I'm not going to buy a blu-ray disk to run in the background during stressing - the optical drive will stay idle)
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a c 144 ) Power supply
March 5, 2014 12:57:43 PM

I found myself completely surprised by the results of running both Furmark and IBT together but where I expected (approximately) to be
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a c 144 ) Power supply
March 11, 2014 10:19:24 AM

Two days left to get your estimate submitted. Here are the specs again
Core i7 4770k
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H
2 x 4 GB GSkill Ripjaws Z @ 2133MHz 1.5v
Sapphire HD7970 Dual-X GPU (only one)
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB
WD Caviar Black 1 TB
Asus Blu-Ray reader (always idle)
Swiftech MCP35X
3 x 140mm fans
2 x 120mm fans
SeaSonic X650
USB keyboard and mouse

What is my maximum draw from the wall?
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a b ) Power supply
March 11, 2014 2:44:48 PM

ima go with 625watts as my final guess.
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a c 144 ) Power supply
March 13, 2014 3:21:39 PM

Before revealing the answer here, a little background of why without getting too boring with details.
I built a gaming rig in 2012 for the first time in 10 years (I was travelling a lot so using laptops). I had never really paid much attention to power or PSU's in the past since I knew as long as I overshot my power needs I would be okay. I live in an area with very unstable power, brownouts quite common, blackouts about every other month so I added a UPS. This UPS has a feature which shows how much power it is supplying and how much time I have to shut down in case of power outage. After setting it up, I was shocked to see just how little power my overclocked, overbuilt, machine was drawing when at load... surely something must be amiss, put a "Kill-A-Watt" meter on it and it confirmed what the UPS was reporting. I began researching power and PSU's and reading more than my fair share of PSU design papers and reviews only to become both amazed and disgusted at the same time. Amazed at the design ingenuity and disgusted that power supplies are a highly unregulated market and there is as much myth about power use as there are shady companies willing to take advantage of those myths (and the lack of general knowledge). During this quest, I did confirm that extremevision's PSU calculator is the most accurate I've found
Revelation in a few hours... stay tuned
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a c 1218 ) Power supply
March 13, 2014 3:27:12 PM

Were you able to determine the wattage/amperage required from each rail? Total system wattage is meaningless without knowing that.
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a c 144 ) Power supply
March 13, 2014 4:44:50 PM

The question, "How much power am I drawing from the wall" has little to do with how it is distributed so I'm not addressing that, this isn't meant to be scientific (no controls or comparisons) but I think it is valid information - at least more so than much I have seen and read. As I have started measuring power draw, I found the numbers rather enlightening, I figure others might also. There are still a great amount of variables not addressed, this is simply one computer running stock speeds - identical system may (probably will) run at a different power draw. The real point of this thread is to point out that power draw is normally much lower than believed. The PSU recommendations wouldn't change because of this since you would still want to be in the 40%-60% draw range (which I am)
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March 13, 2014 4:47:44 PM

C12Friedman said:
Alec Mowat said:
628

But you didn't post your harddrives so I had to guess.


Good point - I shall edit the specs... knew I was forgetting something that drew some power...



If it's from the wall, I'm changing mine 680, based on the PSU.
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Best solution

a c 2489 ) Power supply
March 13, 2014 5:00:43 PM

479 watts
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a c 144 ) Power supply
March 13, 2014 5:38:38 PM

I really figured more variety of (well just more) responses before this... I was going to post before I left for an hour or two but I'll wait instead... repeat of my only hint, "...in the 40%-60% draw range (which I am)"



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a c 144 ) Power supply
March 13, 2014 8:15:27 PM

Okay, here's the max I drew from the wall: 389W. What I found interesting is that that was with Furmark/IBT and it was 40W higher than I had previously gotten to with Unigine Heaven/Prime95. All of my estimations had put me around the 440W mark so I found this number rather compelling.
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