Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
No confusion here; you're absolutely correct, but still missing the point. A recent media PC I built has a continuous draw of 110W at idle conditions, which is much greater than my 1995 PC. My gaming PC has a continuous draw of 400W.
...The only way fossil fuel consumption will be globally reduced is for prices to rise globally. No amount of fuel efficiency improvements will reduce consumption on a global level.
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Monitors tend to suck like 50W continuously (depending on size), if you're counting that, but the actual computer itself these days doesn't draw too much power at idle. CPUs have very advanced power management, and any 40nm or later GPU cuts processor speed and voltage greatly at idle as well. I believe the high power video cards these days draw less than 20W idle despite being able to pull nearly 20 times that under load. Of course, power supply efficiency is a big part, my laptop power brick is a "5" efficiency rating (I forgot who gives those ratings but that corresponds to like 90-92% average efficiency), and the power supply I used to power my external graphics was 80 plus gold, rated for 17A @ 12V so always near peak efficiency
Oh I should mention I had a 460GTX (selling it though) 1GB which happily sat at 400MHz and 0.825V idle.