[Titanium Man]

I finally got to reading the ZDNet Germany article mentioned in yesterday's MacNN. 258 watts for a Pentium 4 at 3.6GHz? Yeeouch! I'd need new air conditioners in my home to run the thing and I could turn down the furnace in winter.

Why isn't Apple plugging more about how the 970FX only consumes about 100 watts peak (if I'm not mistaken)? Surely some companies would be interested in cutting their electric bills while maintaining performance.

[Kenneth]

Apple does that on their G5 whitepaper.. correct me if I was wrong.

So one can cook a meal on the P4 3.6Ghz in no time?

[Lateralus]

Originally posted by Titanium Man:
Why isn't Apple plugging more about how the 970FX only consumes about 100 watts peak (if I'm not mistaken)?

Because Apple never markets the features of their hardware that consumers actually care about.

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

You think westerners care?

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Titanium Man:
I finally got to reading the ZDNet Germany article mentioned in yesterday's MacNN. 258 watts for a Pentium 4 at 3.6GHz?

That's nuts (it may be true, but it's still nuts). I had heard 130ish for a P4E 3.4GHz, maybe that was typical power and this is peak.

[Spliffdaddy]

That's 258watts consumed by the test platform - all inclusive. The chipset version is mentioned alongside the processor description.

The CPU is responsible for perhaps half of that wattage.

As far as the CPU alone goes...

Under full load, a 2.6GHz P4 creates the same (less, slightly) heat output as a 2.5GHz G5.

[GoGoReggieXPowars]

Originally posted by Disgruntled Head of C-3PO:
You think westerners care?

Ontario's electricity price cap won't last forever, man.

[djohnson]

So if we connect the fans that blow the hot air out to the oven, you think it would cook some food?

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Spliffdaddy:
That's 258watts consumed by the test platform - all inclusive. The chipset version is mentioned alongside the processor description.

The CPU is responsible for perhaps half of that wattage.

As far as the CPU alone goes...

Under full load, a 2.6GHz P4 creates the same (less, slightly) heat output as a 2.5GHz G5.

Ah, ok, that makes sense. That's not that high if it includes the whole comp, since a nice PC power supply is rated at 400 watts or so, and the G5's is 600 watts.

[Titanium Man]

Originally posted by Spliffdaddy:
That's 258watts consumed by the test platform - all inclusive. The chipset version is mentioned alongside the processor description.

The CPU is responsible for perhaps half of that wattage.

As far as the CPU alone goes...

Under full load, a 2.6GHz P4 creates the same (less, slightly) heat output as a 2.5GHz G5.

I stand corrected. The News.com article was confusing. It didn't specify the full system, instead referring to the power consumption of any given "chip."

[Scotttheking]

I was going to say, that number is very high.
The 970fx is one of the hotter chips around.
It can draw as much power as some of my complete systems draw, under load. Which is quite disturbing.
My Tibook draws 16 watts under normal usage.

[chrisutley]

You take an accurate survey of people making purchasing decisions between G5 and Pentium based PC's, and I'll show you a survey were heat output and watts are statistically insignificant factors when it comes down to the final decision.

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
Because Apple never markets the features of their hardware that consumers actually care about.

[Spliffdaddy]

It's only an issue if the machine runs on batteries.

While the current draw and heat output of the CPU doesn't matter when plugged into an unlimited power source - it makes all the difference in the world when you have to carry that power source around.

A Pentium4 M consumes about 35 watts. Pair that up with the Intel 855PM (.5 watt) and 855GM (<2 watts) chipsets and you get extremely long battery life.

Another thing to keep in mind is that nearly *all* electrical power that gets consumed by a computer is dissipated as 'waste heat'. If the CPU is consuming 100 watts of power - it's creating about 100 watts of heat. Very inefficient.

That P4 test platform rated at 258 watts is merely turning 257.5 watts of electricity into waste heat.

Let's do a quick calculation to find out how much it costs to operate that 250watt P4 platform...

250watts X 24hours = 6Kw/Hr of electricity

The price of electricity per kilowatt/hour varies quite a lot depending on where you live. In North Carolina, USA it costs me about 10 cents per kilowatt/hour.

Using the example above, it would cost approximately 60 cents per day to operate that machine at full load ($.10 X 6 Kw.Hr). That's $18.00 per month.

If you're a distributed computing participant, you might choose to leave your computer powered-up and crunching numbers 24/7 - under full load. After a year, it would use $219.00 worth of electricity.



OK, now let's assume a dual 2.5 G5 needs 350watts of power (250w + a 2nd CPU @ 100w).....

scary, huh?

But fear not. Those are all calculations based on maximum power usage. The average desktop computer probably consumes under 100watts in normal use (CRT monitors add 100w, flatpanels maybe 20w).
In sleep mode, you're looking at maybe 10 or 20watts - which is dirt cheap.

Heck, you lose 20% of your electricity right from the start. Most computer power supplies are only 80% efficient - or worse. That means for every 100 watts you feed it, it offers just 80 watts to the system components. The rest is waste heat. Of the 80 watts that survived from the original 100, perhaps 79 of them will become waste heat further down the line. Being a watt is kinda pointless sometimes.