Incredile low power from powerful laptop

[agjino]

Hello,

I purchased a Watt meter (Kill-a-watt clone) and measured my Core 2 Duo/Radeon 4850 PC at 110W idle.

My Dell E6410 measured an incredible 8.7W idle with monitor off and 11W monitor at normal brightness.

This system has a Core i5, 6GB RAM and 500GB 7200RPM disk. At the time of measure was seeding more than 10GB of very popular free torrents to at least 50 connections. The system was far from idle.

I read online that desktop Atom systems measure at 25+W and even the new AMD E-350 is 14W without a monitor. My 500$ inverter eats 14W simply plugged in, without any devices or even batteries attached.

Do the mobile parts include power saving features not available in the desktop systems?
Or has Intel made power management in the Core i5 so damn good?
What power consumption can I expect from a desktop Core i5 with integrated graphics and a low power/high efficiencyPSU?

Thank you.

 

[Bacterius]

This system has a Core i5, 6GB RAM and 500GB 7200RPM disk. At the time of measure was seeding more than 10GB of very popular free torrents to at least 50 connections. The system was far from idle.

That is close to idle. The hard drive probably buffers once every two seconds and your network adapter is busy. Memory is always busy and your CPU is virtually idle during networking operations. Try running a global benchmark for an hour, that'll be far from idle.

But yes, the recent power saving solutions are incredibly efficient. You could probably shut the screen down, do some server-like stuff and let the laptop run on battery for a couple days. An i5 shouldn't consume that much and having sandy bridge integrated graphics within the CPU lowers power consumption even further.