Upgrade System to Reduce Power Consumption

[turbinetester]

I'm concerned about consistently high power bills, and i've ordered a Kill-A-Watt to determine how much my PC, and other items, are costing us every month to run. The AC is almost certainly the major culprit, but i have an office PC and a newer HTPC with on board graphics that may be contributing. The meter will be here Tuesday at which point i'll have a pretty good idea of how much my office PC has cost me over the last several years.

I originally built this PC when it was serving a dual purpose as my gaming rig and the office PC for our home business. The PC is now solely an office PC which runs property management and accounting software and I don't game at all now, but i have the same components. Here is the current setup:

Corsair HX1000w Modular Power supply
EVGA nVidia 780i SLI motherboard
Intel Core 2 DUO E6550 2.33GHz
8GB RAM
EVGA 9800GTX + 1GB Video Card with dual DVI outs
120GB SSD
2x2TB Samsung HDD
1 Blu-Ray Drive
Dual 25" 1920x1080 monitors with DVI to HDMI cables

I have considered downgrading the power supply, upgrading to a newer Intel Chip with onboard graphics and buying an appropriate mother board and RAM to be able to keep all of my other components.

1 - Would downgrading the PSU, and switching to a newer chip with onboard graphics reduce the power consumption of this always on PC?

2 - If i did upgrade the chip/board/ram/PSU, what should i go with to be able to run my current monitors at full resolution? Is there a particular best build for an office PC someone could recommend? Thank you in advance for your input.

 

[InvalidError]

You might shave 30W by upgrading the CPU/motherboard/RAM and 30W from ditching your old discrete GPU to use the IGP if you can find a h87 motherboard with a combination of any two of whatever your displays can use. If you cannot find any h87 board with the two outputs you need, modern GPUs still use ~20W less power on the desktop than old GPUs.

With all those upgrades, you might save about 60W and at 24/7, this would be roughly $1.80/month. At this rate, it would take you over 10 years to recover your ~$250 investment. Not really worth it unless you have other reasons to upgrade.

 

[teh_chem]

Having a higher-rated (or in this case lower-rated) power supply will not change what your system is drawing. You could have a 2kw PSU, but your system is still only going to draw whatever amount of power it needs for the current load. So downgrading your PSU would be a waste, unless your current PSU only gets 20% efficiency, and the new one gets 90% efficiency. Though I suspect your efficiency is just fine.

Do you run the computer 24/7? If so, can you simply sleep it when not in use (or does the system need to be on all the time for some reason?). If you don't run your computer 24/7, then I don't think it would be worth any amount of money to buy something new for lower power consumption.

Any intel processor with HD2500/3000 or higher integrated graphics will be able to handle your monitors just fine, assuming no video gaming. Also, any AMD APU system too.

@InvalidError; Savings of 60w 24/7 would be more like $5/mo (using the US average of 0.10/kw-h--YMMV). Savings of about $50/year, so you could recoup that cost within 5 years. Theoretically, of course...

 

[InvalidError]

Savings of about $50/year, so you could recoup that cost within 5 years. Theoretically, of course...

In other words, even with the higher power cost upgrading for saving power is not really worth it if that is the only reason for doing it.

If he waits for Broadwell and DDR4 next year, he might be able to shave another 10W.

Beyond that point, it is time to start looking at PSUs with high efficiency at low loads. The HX1000 is only 85% efficient at its best and only 75% efficient at 100W, probably much worse at 50W. I wish there were more high-quality high-efficiency PSUs below 300W - I bet close to 95% of systems shipping today are in the sub-300W category.