millusions wrote:Watts is what your looking for, a killowatt = 1000 Watts is 30 cents in Australia
Well no wonder. I pay .08, .125 kw/h peak. You are into solar territory paying back!
Measure voltage, measure amps, do the math and that does give you watts. No killawatt gadget needed. Formerly I dealt with unreliable power, slow switches to a CNG genset, battery banks on inverters - there goes 20% right there...
I still have an XP machine with dual X5687's, run them de-hyper-threaded and as dual dual cores and they hold clock while passively cooled. It still sucks power. But it's rarely booted up. The handful of 5500/5600 series are all gone now, I kept the one.
Originally I set out to replace 8 with one, that's where I'm at. It is more efficient to run one super machine than a handful of boxes once a few things run all the time. Multi-seat happens less and less, but it's there. House and shop power control is vm'ified, as is a continuous tivo from a very large antenna, a few hours of 'full transponder' in RAM, along with a few things undisclosed. Of course the ability to run test and experiments in an assisted vm is useful.
I picked the video cards after many iterations. First single slot with real power, and a proper idle. Still have a nvidia box also, they suck power doing nothing. These AMD's idle well, work on all OS's including XP since I still have serial/usb equipment that need it, and older CAD/CAM stuff. They are still not fully realized under debian, but way better than my nvidia's which are also under performing in Debian. Debian doesn't do MST for example while the 2 decade old XP does, though I haven't checked it under debian lately.
The single computer also powers all the extras, no wall warts. I have a breakout harness with all the plugs for the 2 wifi routers and the net switch (yes, a switch used on a single computer), the TV/Radio signal amps, and the discrete cell data thing. That's from an old lesson about heat dissipation and power supplies, they don't do well at high altitude.
Of course somebody will say the complexity isn't worth it and that little fruit pie computers would be simpler and more reliable. I thought that was a reasonable thought 4 years ago. My current up time of 34+ weeks suggest otherwise. And the file server segment never falls asleep!
My Truck can tell you power use, it can delegate from ~0 to 38A for it's 5 heaters, chargers, server, SDR mesh, cameras, and hotspot. It can also run the house in an emergency outage with 3000W+ AC at 1200rpm. No, not factory. All made from components I could order from Hong Kong for cheaper than me mailing them to you. Those days might be gone. Used to receive a few packages a week, that's dried up. So an inductive coil to make a killawat was a buck shipped, no more...I should have stocked up, usually do.
