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Do You Know the Power Intake of Your Computer?

·2 mins

As part of my master’s thesis I measured the power usage of my computer system.1 For the measurement I was granted with a professional hardware measurement tool which was capable of measuring the power intake of my computer system accurately. The facinating thing I’ve noticed was that my day-to-day tower computer does by far not demand as much power as I was initially thinking. I don’t own a massive gaming computer with absolutely blasting specs, but I still expected a way higher power draw. For reference my setup consists of the following parts:

  • Motherboard: Asus TUF Gaming B550M-Plus (Wi-Fi)
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750G
  • RAM: 2x 16GB 2133 Mhz G-Skill F4-3200C16-16GIS, 2x 8GB 2133 Mhz G-Skill F4-3200C16-8GIS
  • GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6600
  • SSD: Samsung 850 EVO

On a fresh Ubuntu Server 22.10 installation I measured exactly 33W power draw during idle mode. The facinating thing was that even when I pushed the CPU to the limit, I’ve barley surpassed a power draw of 100W.2

This means, that it would be easily possible to power my computer with a single solar module assuming a pessimistic watt peak of 100W (A quick google search told me that a 350 watt peak is possible to achieve with a single module). Even accounting that I only measured the power draw of my computer ignoring the displays and periphery and ignoring a typical workload I find this kinda astonishing.

  1. In the thesis I’m using the energy consumption of a computer system as an approximation for carbon emissions. Maybe I get more in the detail in a later post. ↩︎

  2. I measured how the power draw behaves when I push certain components to the limit. The result is kinda interesting and I will probably post about it once all formalities regarding my thesis are done. ↩︎