Power consumption at the wall.

[muthu3dtech]

Suppose I have a 500W PSU and My system is at full Load. My PSU is 80% efficiency. What will be the power consumption from the wall in Watts per hour?

 

[makkem]

Hi
Power consumption will be about 600W or 0.6 KWH.

 

[muthu3dtech]

Will it ever go beyond 800-900?

 

[muthu3dtech]

And How can I say my computer is at full Load? I do a lot of 3d renderings. Will the computer be at full load that time?

 

[J_E_D_70]

You can buy a kill-a-watt meter and plug that in at the wall, then run Prime95 (small FFT) and Furmark to stress your CPU and GPU. That should show you max pull at the wall.

 

[rwpritchett]

Just because you have a 500W PSU doesn't mean that is what it draws. Your computer will only draw the power it needs. At idle, you may be drawing only 50-60W. It all depends on what hardware you have, nobody can begin to guess what you are drawing at load.

J_E_D has the right idea, get a kill-a-watt meter from a local hardware store.

 

[RetiredChief]

No one can answer the question based on the inormation provided.

For a given system a PSU rated at say 500W verses a 1000W PSU for the same system will draw very close to the same wattage at the outlet (within about 10%)

To detirem your wattage:
.. For a good estimated, take your GPU and google it for a review, most reviews will indicaet "system Power" both at idle and at load. This will generally be a little higher than what you will have. divide that by the Effiency rating for the PSU, if unknown use 70% and that will approximate your Power consumption at the wall.
For most with a GPU =< 7870 your power should be around 100W @ idle and 300->350 watts loaded.

IE My system has a 7850 GPU, googling it I find that my system power should be 220->290 Watts (Loaded) which would be less than 400 Watts . My measured power was approx 300 Watts (If I remember correcly).
NOTE This is ONLY for the computer and des nOT include monitor/scanner/printers.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5625/amd-radeon-hd-7870-ghz-edition-radeon-hd-7850-review-rounding-out-southern-islands/17.

To determine exacty, as J_E_D_70 stated buy a watt meter - Newegg often has the Killawatt on sale for around $15.
I use Furmark to load system, which is generally slightly higher than runing a game.

 

[k1114]

Rendering usually involves a cpu renderer, so only your cpu is at load but with a realistic varying workload you won't stay at max power for long periods of time. If you don't want to get a killawatt meter, you can estimate your full load power depending on your specs.