Watt's Up...Component Power Consumption...
Eco-responsibility is a hot topic (pun intended :)) at Sun and certainly worldwide with the recent announcement of Nobel Peace prize. One of the questions that comes up often is "What really consumes power in a system?", so here is a good table that I found on tomshwardware.com for desktop power consumption:
The information above gives are really good starting point for understanding power consumption in a system.
I say "staring point" because components like CPUs, video cards, and memory are increasingly becoming power pigs. An Intel Dual Core Xeon Processor (5080) consumes up to 130 watts per processor and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ consumes 125 watts per processor with multipe processors per motherboard being a common option (reference). NVIDIA's flagship GeForce 8000 GTX graphics card consumes 277 watts loaded and other cards measure up to 387 watts (reference). New fully buffered DIMMs (FB-DIMMs) are now pushing over 10 watts per DIMM (and remember you generally have 2-4 DIMMs in a desktop).
As part of being eco-responsible it is important to consider "Watt's in your system?". :) Seriously though, the next time your decide to buy a new system, or upgrade an existing one, consider the philosophy "less is more" by asking what do you really need. Getting a GeForce 8000 GTX may be cool but unless you are a hard core gamer it will likely be a waste of money and power. Maybe getting one 2 GB DIMM instead of two 1 GB DIMMs or getting two 1 TB hard drives instead four 500 Gig drives will give you the same capacity with less power consumption.
| Component | Best Case | Worst Case |
|---|---|---|
| Power Supply | 5-15 W | 40-60 W |
| Motherboard | 10-15 W | 30-50 W |
| Processor | 12-30 W | 60-120 W |
| RAM | 5-15 W | 30-50 W |
| Hard Drive | 3-5 W (2.5") | 10-15 W (3.5") |
| Graphics Card | 3-10 W (integrated) | 25-180 W (PCI Express) |
| Total | 38-90 W | 195-475 W |
I say "staring point" because components like CPUs, video cards, and memory are increasingly becoming power pigs. An Intel Dual Core Xeon Processor (5080) consumes up to 130 watts per processor and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ consumes 125 watts per processor with multipe processors per motherboard being a common option (reference). NVIDIA's flagship GeForce 8000 GTX graphics card consumes 277 watts loaded and other cards measure up to 387 watts (reference). New fully buffered DIMMs (FB-DIMMs) are now pushing over 10 watts per DIMM (and remember you generally have 2-4 DIMMs in a desktop).
As part of being eco-responsible it is important to consider "Watt's in your system?". :) Seriously though, the next time your decide to buy a new system, or upgrade an existing one, consider the philosophy "less is more" by asking what do you really need. Getting a GeForce 8000 GTX may be cool but unless you are a hard core gamer it will likely be a waste of money and power. Maybe getting one 2 GB DIMM instead of two 1 GB DIMMs or getting two 1 TB hard drives instead four 500 Gig drives will give you the same capacity with less power consumption.
