trip all the circuit breakers except the one feeding the computer to make sure; watch your electricity meter, and time how long it takes to use one kWh. If it takes 5 hours, your computer's taking 200W, etc. This will probably read high, ie. safe, and also tells you how much it costs to run.
This is a pain, so I make an educated guess using rules of thumb:
Yes, I can see this would be a pain. I'll have to consider it on a weekend when the wife's away...
motherboard 75-100W, graphics card (w/o fan) 10W (with) 25W, each hard drive 15W, CD drive 10W but only when active, other stuff 10-20W. This gives roughly 200W for my GA-7ZXE/1.533GHz Athlon 1800XP/six hard drives. It has a 235W PSU which starts to get unhappy if I put another hard drive on, so it's not too far out. Bigger PSU is on TOGET list.
Ouch! And I was looking into the 30W VIA Eden client PC's I guess they would go a long ways to cutting power (and heat) issues.
I'm going to guess that you maybe have more capable motherboards but fewer hard drives, and your PSUs are running at around half their capacity or a little more, which is good.
No. I have at best a 750MHz PC and only one HDD on each one.
-- I'm ANN LANDERS!! I can SHOPLIFT!!
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