Can I reduce power consumption & maintain performance?

[zappo]

I recently had to upgrade my CPU because my old one died, the replacement was an Intel Q6600 which I was able to easily overclock from 2.4 to 3 ghz.

I work from home and have the PC on for 12 hours a day and my daytime electricity usage has tripled.

I have turned everything else off and watched the meter and it is definately the PC that is the cause.

So I am wondering whether it would be cheaper to upgade my motherboard, CPU and Ram to an Icore variety in that it would use less power and provide a similar level of performance (assuming it is not overclocked).

If so what Icore is going to consume less electricity and provide similar performance. I do not have any fancy benchmarking software and would not understand it anyway, but Windows 7 64bit performance index reports my processor calcs per second at 7.3.

I currently have two hard disks which I could consolidate to one to reduce power consumption and I have a Geforce 8800GT. The onboard graphics of my Gigabyte gigabyte g33m-ds2r could not power my 24 inch screen, but I am hoping a new generation motherboard might, any recommendations would be appreciated.

 

[GhislainG]

How many watts does your PC draw and what's the cost per watt in your area? If you already know, what's the monthly cost to power that PC?

 

[zappo]

I have no idea or means to measure, what I know is that it used 1255 Kwh in 99 days which is 12 Kwh per day.

How many watts does your PC draw and what's the cost per watt in your area? If you already know, what's the monthly cost to power that PC?