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I really enjoy my Kill-A-Watt.
I have a 5 year old (mostly) PC with the following specs:
Core i5 3570K
Zotac Z77ITX-AE motherboard
2x 4GB G.Skill low voltage DDR3 1600
Samsung PM871 250GB SSD
Western Digital Green 1.5TB HDD
MSI GTX 1050 Ti
Sparkle 400w Platinum-rated PSU
Torture testing the CPU, I have a total system power consumption (at the wall) of approximately 130w. I've played with undervolting and brought that 130w figure down to 107w, but by adjusting the voltage, some of Intel's power saving features break and idle power consumption increases from ~28w to ~38w. Since my PC is mostly idle most of the time when it's on, it doesn't seem productive, so I've left it stock.
Adding in video card adds about 70w when running a "power virus" like Furmark. So, worst-case power usage is something like 200w at the wall, or probably close to 170-180w before conversion losses. Typical "desktop" usage will have power consumption bouncing in the 30-50w range, while gaming is more typically in the 125-150w range.
I see new CPUs with much lower TDPs, and I'm guessing you can get greater performance within a slightly smaller power envelope.
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