Skynet wants YOU!

[Aquaplant]

Originally Posted by Sight Unseen

Mad? How so?

Without knowing anything else, I'd be afraid to be in the same room with your computers power supply, since I just might get zapped.

They seem like perfectly acceptable wattages to me, remember any hpc type application will load your system to it's max. I've even found that folding makes my CPU 2C hotter than 6 instances of K10 CPUBurn.

How can you exceed 100% load on all cores?

Under normal usage, the server pulls about 150W, and most of that is the power used to keep the disk drives spinning, and the desktop pulls about 375W, which is still high, but it's overclocked on a board with High RDS(on) mosfets, which are horribly inefficient. (Srsly, never buy any 4-phase mobo from MSI. ever. their 8-phase mobos are quite good though.)

Some disk drives you have there it seems, or then you have like 5 or more of them in your server. (I know, server needs storage capacity, but how many 2-3 TB drives do you need?)

150W isn't all that much, but the 375W that is consumed by desktop under normal usage sounds scary. Still, overclocking, if insane enough voltages are used, can push your consumption through the roof, but it's hardly energy efficient. Not to mention the shorter lifespan of the chip itself due to overvolting.

Well I don't know what your normal usage means, but you said that those numbers were CPU usage only. What kind of GPU(s) do you have? Does normal usage mean gaming, which would at least somewhat explain the high numbers.

And yes, HNM is right, electricity is expensive. However, I got my shiny new Phenom II X6 around the same time the AC stopped working, so the new AC provides a great excuse for any differences in the power bill...

I have found the idea of highly power efficient computers fascinating, when you consider the things you can do, but still retain rather low power consumption relative to the task being done. For most usage scenarios, computers are already "fast enough" (for video encoding, nothing is fast enough), so focusing more on performance/Watt seems more reasonable in this day and age.