PC Wattage

[thomas49th]

Hi, my my - top one in my sigs only consumes, with the lcd connected to the power plug as well, ~ 130W, even under load. Seeing as the graphics card and motherboard said I need at least a 400W psu, i was surprised when I measured this. I checked the watt meter on the kettle and hover and was getting the right reading. My PSU is 600W, and i wouldn't expect it to be using 600W, yet I would expect it to be atleast a couple of hundred watts. The PSU was a fairly cheap one as well, so there are inefficiencies in that. Then I tried it on another pc (think it's near bottom in sig) celeron d 2.53ghz, 2 gb ddr ram1 ide disk 250W PSU ati raedon 9550 and that was about ~ 130 watts aswell. I know ddr ram and most ide drives consume more power than there successors, but still 130W power consumption is surprising.


Any thoughts?
Thomas

 

[sniperviper21]

probably depends on what CPU usage u were at, idle or max load

 

[berry120]

As said above, the power consumption will vary a lot depending on how much you're maxing out the system. If it's sitting there completely idle then it won't draw much at all, start maxing the CPU, graphics cards etc. out and you'll probably find it shoots up. Perhaps run a stress test and then measure it - you might find it then gets a lot closer to a figure you were expecting!