Quad Core PCs and Utility Bills

[AARRGGHHH]

I had someone tell me today that Intel's Core 2 Dual and Quad cores are the hottest running and most energy wasting CPUs Intel has ever created, increasing utility bills an average of $100 a month. No, I didn't by it, "hottest running" and "energy wasting" goes against everything I've read about the Core 2 processors (although it may have been accurate for the Prescotts). He obviously just has a grudge against Intel.

It still did get me curious, how much does a new build add to a power bill? In my case, I'll be going with a Q6600, and probably an nVidia 320MB 8800 VGA. It obviously wont be running at full intensity all the time. I'm guesstimating (interesting... Firefox let "guesstimating" pass as spelled correctly) about $25 - $35 a month.

Thanks

 

[croc]

I had someone tell me today that Intel's Core 2 Dual and Quad cores are the hottest running and most energy wasting CPUs Intel has ever created, increasing utility bills an average of $100 a month. No, I didn't by it, "hottest running" and "energy wasting" goes against everything I've read about the Core 2 processors (although it may have been accurate for the Prescotts). He obviously just has a grudge against Intel.

It still did get me curious, how much does a new build add to a power bill? In my case, I'll be going with a Q6600, and probably an nVidia 320MB 8800 VGA. It obviously wont be running at full intensity all the time. I'm guesstimating (interesting... Firefox let "guesstimating" pass as spelled correctly) about $25 - $35 a month.

Thanks

And you pay how much per kw/hr?

 

[sunangel]

back in the day i had a p4 3.4ghz northwood, 4 sticks corsair xms ddr400, ati 9800xt, asus p4c800, 6 hdds, 4 odds, pci nvidia dualtv, pci creative audigy 2, and pci wireless card. this setup was causing about $10-$20 a month, depending if the computer was able to go into standby. if memory serves me right, that p4 used 95 watts. my q6600 uses what, 103 watts? I nolonger have a loaded system. I just use my intel g965ot mobo, q6600, 4 sticks ddr2-800, raid0 and 2 odds, ati hd2600xt, and two hauppauge 1600's. This setup is using about $10 a month. I attribute the power saving solely to intel's speedstep. i do not do standby anymore. the frustating part for me is my p4 was just as powerful as the q6600. so, i wasted more money on upgrading trying to save money on energy costs. stupid thing to do. won't happen again, though. last time upgrading for about another 5 years.

 

[blashyrkh]

hmm... Dude could you elaborate on the fact that "my p4 was just as powerful as the q6600" ??? Just as powerful in what? Using the calculator and listening to mp3's in winamp? Damn man, that is very ignorant of you. How can you compare a 5-6 years single core CPU with a brand new 4 Core monster of a CPU? Unless, by "powerful" you meen "full of power" as in Watts...

 

[rammedstein]

it could be ln2 cooled and run at 12ghz with 2.5vcore, lol!

 

[jitpublisher]

Oh good grief. A new build over an older build won't increase your utility bill by more than $10-$15, at the most. Unless you are building dual quad-core 8 drive raid file server for you and the whole 36 square block neighborhood to share anyway.

 

[valis]

where i live electricity costs ~8 cents per kilowatt hour.

$100.00 / .08 = 1250 kilowatt hours

x(kilowatts) * .08 * 720 (hours in a month) = 100.00
that equation means, how many watts must something be using to equal 100 dollars when constantly on for the entire month.

solve for x
x = 100.00/ (.08 * 720)
x = 100.00/57.6
x = 1.736 kilowatts or 1736 watts.

in order for a cpu to add 100.00 to my utility bill it needs to be using 1736 watt's of power and be on continuously the entire month.

meaning, you'd have to have a 2000 watt power supply, or more, to even turn your computer on.

bottom line?
whoever told you that is an idiot.

typically power supplies these days are 500-700 watt ps's, but the computer doesn't actually use nearly that much on a typical day. thinkgeek.com has a nifty device called the "kill-a-watt" that measures actual energy useage from whatever is plugged into it. using that i found that ALL of my computers put together (i measured each one) add ~50 dollars to my utility bill a month, and this is the combination of:
a p4 3.2 gig northwood with 3 hard drives, two video cards, and three 21" crt monitors
a p3 comp with nothing special
a p4 1.6 gig
a dual xeon 550 mhz file server w/ 5 hard drives
a dell p3 933 mhz box
a custom built file server with 7 500 gig hard drives and 6 high cfm fans

and those are all on 24/7

Valis

 

[weskurtz81]

valis, did you measure all those while they were maxed out? IE, 100% cpu, gpu, and harddrive activity? A pretty good way to measure them is on boot up also. Well, I guess you don't run all those 24/7 full load either, so they wouldn't add a ton to the bill.

wes

 

[weskurtz81]

To the OP, the new quad cores are among the hottest running cpu's, but, they will not cost you anything near what that clown told you they would per month. Even if you were folding@home it would probably be around $40 to $50 a month MAX. And that is assuming 700W is full load, which it won't be, it will be lower than that.

wes

 

[valis]

valis, did you measure all those while they were maxed out? IE, 100% cpu, gpu, and harddrive activity? A pretty good way to measure them is on boot up also. Well, I guess you don't run all those 24/7 full load either, so they wouldn't add a ton to the bill.

wes

yeah, i wanted as clear a picture as possible so for each machine i left it plugged into the "kill-a-watt" for a 24 hour period and used that as the basis for the calculations. the killawatt can check to see how many kwh are being used from when you turn it on to when you turn it off. i did that to ensure i got a good picture of the total usage over a full day, rather than taking a spot measurement of any one particular moment. took that number times 30.3 for the month and yadda yadda

interestingly enough, the CRT's use far more energy than the computers do. so ever since then i've tried to have the monitors turned off as much as possible.

Valis

 

[nukemaster]

WTF? 100$ a month.....no way....

Q6600 G0 @ 2.93
P5W DH
4 sticks of DDR 667(well 2 800 and 2 667 all @ 2.0 volts 4,4,4,10)
6 HDD's
WinTV PVR 250(i want a 500 )
1 ODD
SB Audigy 2zs
Geforce 8800 GTX 600core 1400shaders 900x2 mem
4 120mm fans
1 200mm fan
Zalman 9500AT (fan @ 85 percent ~2000rpms)cpu fan
@ idle 240 watts according to my UPS. 300 @ folding on all cores. I dont pay much attention to full game load. NO speedstep here....since i always fold when its on

To compare my other systems 110 watt @ folding load [EDITED closer to 110 watts, restested]
K7S5A 3.xx
XP 1800 @ stock
1 stick of SDR 133
120 gig ide hard drive
2 ODD's (never used anyway, just fills the hole in the case)
AC 97 sound (SIS)
Geforce 4ti 4200
2 80mm fans
Vantec areoflow heatsink(fan @ 4700rpms)

Take off the fact that 8800's are not known for there low idle power usage i say that 4 cpus + 5 hard drives + lots of cooling + 8800GTX @ just under 3x[EDIT a little more then 2X but still good for the high speed] the power is not a bad trade off for the performance increase. It's MASSSSSIVE fast compared to the 1800+ system and not that much more then my e6600 system...

[EDIT to be more accurate i will be testing (when i get a chance) with a meter and not my UPS as it has to many variables attached to it. phone, router, switch, modem]

 

[sunangel]

hmm... Dude could you elaborate on the fact that "my p4 was just as powerful as the q6600" ??? Just as powerful in what? Using the calculator and listening to mp3's in winamp? Damn man, that is very ignorant of you. How can you compare a 5-6 years single core CPU with a brand new 4 Core monster of a CPU? Unless, by "powerful" you meen "full of power" as in Watts...

transcoding dvds with DivX is took 5-10 minutes longer with the P4 3.4ghz Northwood longer than its taking with the Q6600. Spending over a $1000 for a new set up to save up to 10 minutes on encoding is rediculous. I was expecting a hugher difference. For the $1000 I spent, that would have easily paid additional electrical cost of $10 per month for 100 months. Now, do you see my reasoning behind "powerful"?

 

[choirbass]

the difference there sounds like its limited then to how well optimized the software is for specific SMP tasks... if its poorly optimized, it may only be using around the processing equivalent of 1 core out of 4 (practically not SMP aware at all then)

but, you should try transcoding 4 dvds simultaneously then (4 instances of divx, hopefully you can run 4 different divx's at the same time, might need different directories for each instance though), just because you can with relative ease now if nothing else (since its mainly just sounding like sub par software optimizations, rather than sub par cpu performance)... and that should be a more substantial improvement... and then try transcoding those 4 same dvds simultaneously on the p4 3.4 (which would put it more on par with a P4 @ ~850MHz), you should then see an overall improvement far more substantial than just 5-10 minutes, possibly in the range of several hours difference, or more. (thats assuming you still have the p4). as far as % cpu usage, i believe divx encoding is SMP aware, but i honestly do not feel its using anywhere near the percentage that it could be, with a relatives C2D, it only used just over half, and the rest sat idle..

that was the same situation with games at first with dual core cpus, because most games werent even aware that there was a second core, so the reason for having the second core was practically non existant, aside from gameplay being smoothed out some, due to being able to balance the cpu load of different processes between cores, so the cpu load was never even at 100% most of the time, unless you intentionally taxed both cores with multiple applications (as it seems you might need to do currently for what youre doing). now theyre designing games that can take full advantage of both cores, and even quad cores, and more even (if theyre true SMP aware games, that can scale accordingly) and the benefit is quite apparent, compared to just sticking with a single core anymore.

 

[bfellow]

just build a Quadfather with 2900XTs if you want to burn your utility bills more.

 

[zenmaster]

TDP of Q6600 G0 CPU= 95w

TDP oof Pentium D 840 = 130w
TDP of Athlon 6000+ Dual Core CPU = 130w
TDP of Athlon 4800+ Dual Core CPU = 110w.

So as you can see the new Intel Quad Cores use LESS power than
older top end CPUs.

 

[rodney_ws]

I had someone tell me today that Intel's Core 2 Dual and Quad cores are the hottest running and most energy wasting CPUs Intel has ever created, increasing utility bills an average of $100 a month. No, I didn't by it, "hottest running" and "energy wasting" goes against everything I've read about the Core 2 processors (although it may have been accurate for the Prescotts). He obviously just has a grudge against Intel.

It still did get me curious, how much does a new build add to a power bill? In my case, I'll be going with a Q6600, and probably an nVidia 320MB 8800 VGA. It obviously wont be running at full intensity all the time. I'm guesstimating (interesting... Firefox let "guesstimating" pass as spelled correctly) about $25 - $35 a month.

Thanks

My power company is kind enough to show me what I paid for electricity 12 months ago... so I've got a pretty good idea of my electrical consumption history. That said... during that period I ditched my desktop (X2-4400+ OC'd to 2.6, 7800 GTX OC'd and a CRT) to a modest Core Duo laptop. I hadn't really given any thought to saving money... I just like having something with internet access on my coffee table. During this same period my utility company raised my electric rates a fairly substantial amount (I don't recall exactly how much) and somehow my power bill has been lower (historically speaking) month after month. Clearly my desktop was costing me more than I realized. My laptop is powered on probably double the hours my desktop. However, I agree with your skepticism over blowing $100+ / month just because of your choice in CPUs. My average monthly bill has dropped from around $50 to $40 (I'm averaging this out... int's slightly higher in the summer and lower in the winter)... no, I'm not going to retire off the $120 I save, but after a few years it might just pay for a new laptop.

 

[nukemaster]

transcoding dvds with DivX is took 5-10 minutes longer with the P4 3.4ghz Northwood longer than its taking with the Q6600. Spending over a $1000 for a new set up to save up to 10 minutes on encoding is rediculous. I was expecting a hugher difference. For the $1000 I spent, that would have easily paid additional electrical cost of $10 per month for 100 months. Now, do you see my reasoning behind "powerful"?

must have been running a non SMP.

Check out the charts, the quad owns P4. I even used a 3.6 prescott as there was no 3.4 northwood

Even in video there is quite a gain. even more when you think of the short video times. so when you do a full video there is quite a savings of time.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=871&model2=908&chart=435

 

[coldmast]

http://forum.videohelp.com/topic314874.html

 

[AARRGGHHH]

Thanks for all of the exceptional replies here, they've been very helpful. I have just one more power curiosity, regarding video cards: I'm currently debating an nVidia 7900 vs the 320 MB RAM nVidia 8800. I'll be using the card for 3D Animation Rendering, not Gaming, but 8800 outperformed the 7900 in both the Gaming and 3DMark benchmarks, so I'm willing to gamble that the 8800 will give me improved rendering speeds.

I'm curious about what the more power hungry 8800 will do when I'm not rendering. Will it still pull (I've heard numbers as high as 200 watts) of power (is that accurate?), or is it able to calm down and just draw what it needs from the power supply when it's not doing something graphics intensive?

I know, it's a basic question, but this is my first time around the block with putting something better than a $50 video card in my machine. I'm looking forward to seeing the performance increase.

Thanks

 

[reconviperone1]

Wow, I'm really starting to rethink this quad core thing, I dont want to pay a extra 10 buks a month , I have two computers and a laptop, I think im gonna star using the laptop more. Back in the old days computers barely took more power than a lightblb, and monitors were the enegy hogs, now it's the other way around(if u have a lcd).

 

[StevieD]

Try a business with 100 computers.

My single biggest energy sucking device?

Overhead lighting.

#2 on the hit parade is HVAC.

Those two huge power sucking draws are about 87% of my electrical consumption.

Elevator, electric forklifts, microwaves and refrigerators and vending equipment in employee breakrooms. Another big suckoff.

Never computed the draw by CPU's and Monitors. At this point those numbers are not going to be real big.

Shifting to a less power hungary CPU would save money. The how much is not going to be measurable by the average user or by my business.

Why?

Because in your home you have..... Central Air, Water Heater, Refrigerator, Washer & Dryer, Range & Oven, Microwave, Vacuum cleaners and other small appliances, that big CRT TV in the den, that little 50" plasma TV in the living room. TV's in the kids rooms and of course those nice little LCD's hanging in the kitchen and the bathrooms. Surround sound stereo system with 900 watt amp. Maybe a second surround sound for the teenage son. A couple playstations. Electric garage door. Outdoor flood lighting. The pump and filter system for the inground pool.

Changing from a P4 to a Q6850? Chump change in electricity compared to the other electrical sucking devices in your home.


Who is going to save money on changing to a lower power consumption CPU? Server farms and big businesses with thousands of employees per office building or call center.

Us small guys just get to feel good about ourselves and think we are saving $.

 

[MattC]

I have a kill-a-watt meter and my system uses around 200 watts under a high load. I use it for at the most 5 hours a day and most of that is idle if I have it on that long.
Assuming it is on 5 hours a day under load, that's:
5hrs X 200watts X .001KWatts/Watt = 1KWHr/day
My local energy rates are around 12 cents per KWHr
365 X .12 = 43.8$/year = 3.65$/month