Measure power consumption?

[Tim]

On Mon, 2009-10-26 at 12:26 +0100, Joerg Bergmann wrote:
> Some better PC power supplies have near to zero idle power, but cheap
> power supplies show large idle power even nowadays.

Minimal, perhaps, but not near zero.  Ye canna change the laws of
physics...  

Everything's inefficient, just to different degrees.  You'd hope a power
supply isn't so wasteful that it uses lots of power when not really
under a heavy load, but some are.  And then the efficient ones may not
use a whole lot more power while under moderate load than while under
light load.  Not to forget, plug a computer into a power supply, even
one that's sitting idle, it's still using power.

To make an efficient computer, you'd have to remove all the devices that
you won't need (burners, drivers, cards, etc.), and use a motherboard
that doesn't have them all, itself.  Some devices have low-power/standby
modes, but they're still using some power, even then.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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