Current Consumption

[skayqz]

Hi, i have a pc that has a 240w power supply, mostly 180W using about everyday for about 4-8 hours.

if i am paying for energy (0.068$ kWh is what i am paying for).

Then if i get a better pc for example an

Dell 3050 Tower Intel Core i5-7500 8GB DDR4 256GB SSD 

and do the same power usage as above will i pay the same?

[Avocado Diaboli]

Yeah, if you use the same amount of power in total (assuming you have a single rate; there are places where electricity is cheaper or more expensive depending on the time of day) you pay the same amount for it. 180 W usage for the same amount of time at the same rate will cost the same, regardless of what's using that power.

[skayqz]

4 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Yeah, if you use the same amount of power in total (assuming you have a single rate; there are places where electricity is cheaper or more expensive depending on the time of day) you pay the same amount for it. 180 W usage for the same amount of time at the same rate will cost the same, regardless of what's using that power.

I meant that the usage will be the same but will i pay more for energy?

[TylerD321]

12 minutes ago, skayqz said:

I meant that the usage will be the same but will i pay more for energy?

If you use more power you pay for more power. The difference will likely be negligible though. My i7 10700k overclocked and 3080 hits like 550 watts max. When I was folding on my gpu 24/7 I was averaging 3 dollars of power usage a day and .097/kwh in Kentucky. I wouldn’t expect it to be much different if any without adding a new gpu on top of equation. Technically if the newer dell has a higher capacity psu but consumes the same, you might still pay less in power since power supplies are most efficient around 50% usage. That said, this is not worth prioritizing because the money saved in this low power of a device is likely way lower than the cost of a bigger power supply.

[Thaldor]

6 minutes ago, skayqz said:

I meant that the usage will be the same but will i pay more for energy?

Why would you? Do you pay more depending on what devices you have? If there isn't some magical kingdom where energy companies go around and snoop what devices customers have, no, your rate will remain the same, you will pay the same for your energy. If your consumption changes then your monthly bill will change but your rate for the energy will be the same no matter even if you bought a supercomputer or just extremely wasteful space heater.

[Spotty]

7 minutes ago, skayqz said:

I meant that the usage will be the same but will i pay more for energy?

You mean you're using the computer the same amount of hours each day...?

 

How much you pay will depend on how much electricity you consume.

 

If your current system consumed 180W and you used it for 8 hours a day that would be an energy consumption of 1.440kWh per day. If you pay a rate of $0.068 per kWH that's less than 10c per day, or around $35 per year.

 

28 minutes ago, skayqz said:

Then if i get a better pc for example an

Dell 3050 Tower Intel Core i5-7500 8GB DDR4 256GB SSD 

A system like that won't consume much power. It will likely draw less power than what your current system draws.

 

Let's say it draws 100W. Over 8 hours a day that's 0.8kWh which will cost you 5.4c per day or around $20 per year.

[skayqz]

Welp, thanks everyone for your replies i now know what to do lol

[mariushm]

Your computer doesn't use a fixed amount of energy, the power consumption will vary depending on what you do.  For example, when you're just watching a video on Youtube, your computer probably hovers around 40-60 watts, and when you're playing games the video card may run at full power and consume an extra 80-100 watts.

 

You're paying  0.068$ kWh, that means if your computer has a constant power consumption of 100 watts, it would have to run for 10 hours to consume 1 kWh (1000 watt hours) and make you pay $0.068 watts.

 

Note that if you want super exact power consumption you need one of those Kill-a-watt tools. (power meter you put in your mains socket and then plug your PC or an extension cord into that power meter)

 

Without one, you can get a fairly decent determination about how much power some components like the CPU and video card consume with a tool like HWInfo64, but you won't be able to include the losses in the power supply (due to conversion efficiencies) and you won't have numbers for the motherboard, fans, cpu cooler, hard drives (which admittedly aren't very big in total and kind of constant)

 

For example, let's say your computer components consume in total 50 watts, but at such low power consumption level, the power supply may be only 80% efficient - that means those 50 watts are 80% of the actual power consumed from the mains socket, so the computer actually consumes 50 * 100/80 =  62.5 watts and 12.5 watts are lost in the power supply as heat.  If you look in HWInfo64 you may add there the power consumption reported by CPU and video card and come up with something like 40 watts (the rest up to 50 watts being consumed by ram, chipset, onboard audio, network, usb ports powering keyboard, mouse, cpu cooler, fans)

 

That 240 watts power supply is most likely above 90% efficient pretty much anywhere above around 50 watts of power consumption.

[Needfuldoer]

In general, newer hardware is more power efficient than old parts. Depending on what you're running now, you can either get the same compute power for less electricity power, or more compute power for the same electricity power.

 

Your electric rate is very low, and your power supply is running right in the middle of its efficiency sweet spot, so to be honest I wouldn't worry about it much. 

 

If you really want to draw as little power as possible, get a laptop. 

[TylerD321]

1 hour ago, htimsenyawed said:

Ah, Kentucky. I love this state but I really hope you don’t have Kentucky Utilities. I just looked at my bill, due on Christmas oddly enough, to see the kWh cost and the break down. 
 

That’s not including a 3.00% tax for school and 2.35% ‘franchise fee’ which is something I don’t understand - does KU franchise out their name like McDonald’s?

 

It brings the total cost to $166.29 - which seems kind of high since I heat with LP… it was cheaper during the summer with AC on. 
 

 

Edit: they also sent a letter before Thanksgiving that within the next 10 days I’d be getting a modern digital meter… it’s the middle of December and I still have my March of 1993 meter. 

I do have KU, barf! This month was 175 for me but I blame folding 24/7 on two pcs. Last month was only 100 dollars!

[skayqz]

What if i have an Lenovo M800 Tower, Intel Core i7-6700 8GB ddr4 256GB SSD, gtx 1050 ti low profile

 

will it consume the same as i said up?

[TylerD321]

6 minutes ago, skayqz said:

What if i have an Lenovo M800 Tower, Intel Core i7-6700 8GB ddr4 256GB SSD, gtx 1050 ti low profile

 

will it consume the same as i said up?

Pro tip, google the TDP of your processor and GPU every time you have a question and add them. That will be the ballpark range of your power consumption. Of course there is a little bit extra used between drives, fans, etc. But CPU/GPU are your big ones.