[ale] screen saver eats 15 - 30 watts

Ron Frazier (ALE) atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com
Tue Apr 2 11:20:01 EDT 2013


Hi all,

I've been monitoring my desktop computer that I mentioned in the litecoin thread.  I have a great little device attached to the power cord called a kill-a-watt ez, which you can buy at Home Depot.  This device tabulates both instantaneous power consumption (every second) and long term power consumption over a period of time, as well as cost to operate whatever is plugged into it.

At any given time, the numbers vary quite a bit, but you can get a sense of the average.

When I came in, this morning, I noticed the numbers were higher than they typically were in its steady state mode.  I did some testing and found that the screen saver was consuming 15 - 30 W.  I should note that there is 100 W difference in power consumption between idling my CPU and maxing it out.  So, the screen saver is apparently taxing the cpu and gpu a bit.

At $ .097 / kwh, it costs $ 7 / mo to run a 100 W (or .1 KW) load for 24 hours / day for 30 days.

So, just running the screen saver is potentially costing me $ 2 / mo.  It's not going to break the bank, but there's no point in wasting that energy and money.  My monitors are LCD's, which are not susceptible to burn-in.  So, I don't care what the screen saver it doing.  It's more of a lock screen.

The screen saver I was using is mystify (windows).  It puts fancy curvy geometric lines on the screen which continually move and change.  It looks cool.  I changed it to a slowly moving line of text which shows the computer name.  This text is a solid color, and I turned off the "reflections" effect, which requires lots of 3d graphics computations.

My power consumption now actually drops by a couple of W when the screen saver is on.

So, if you have a fancy smancy 3d screen saver running on a big computer, or several big computers, maybe with multiple monitors, you might want to look at how much power it's consuming.

Just thought I'd pass this along.  Hope it's helpful.

Sincerely,

Ron

 

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Ron Frazier
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linuxdude AT techstarship.com




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