Energy efficient PC build?

[neufuse Veteran]

I'm amazed at the lack of responses to has anyone used a CPU hydro cooler question :rofl:

[mattmatik]

I was looking at that same cooling solution. My proc doesn't need it but I think I will upgrade to a K series in the winter. Currently got a Hyper 212 Evo. Are liquid cooling units more power efficient than a heatsink with fan?

[neufuse Veteran]

Well I built my new system, went with an i5 Ivy Bridge for now... still runs faster then my 920 i7 benchmark wise so far

Went with a corsair Obsidian 550D case... love it! the accustical insulation and rubber gaskets defaintly cut sound down, I can't even hear the thing runing. I can only hear the back fan when I get within 2 ft of it. Power button, reset button, are solid, USB3 on the front is nice, LED's are white but not bright, they are a good brightness for night time... only downside to this case is there is no suspend LED if you wanted that... my MSI motherboard has a pin for power and a pin for suspend, can only plug the power un, so when its suspended I can't see it blinking or change color. but that is a minor issue...

Set the main OS boot drive up as a samsung 830 128GB SSD running on a 6Gb/s SATA port

Have two 1TB backup HDD's running on SATA 3Gb/s ports in RAID1

Went with a Z77 Chipset MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard, was going to go with GD80 but couldn't justify the almost $100 price increase for thunderbolt.

Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz Ivy Bridge CPU

16GB of DDR3 RAM

and threw in my previous gen Creative Labs x-fi pci express sound card... onboard sound with the MSI motherboard was causing whineing and electonic noise... not sure why, it went away with the x-fi card though...

installed windows 7 x64 as a UEFI boot

after all that, the system idles at 42 watts. full 100% CPU usage it maxes out at 109 watts, average usage it hovers between the 42 watts and 52 watts.

definatly a huge decrease in electic usage... 200 watts per hour saved should save me almost 3KWh a day! that's about 1 megawatt saved in a year!

Add this in too, I only have the stock cooler right now and an older 80% efficiency PSU at the moment (newer 92% efficient 80+Platnum certified is coming monday)

so wattage should go down more when I get the higher efficiency PSU on, right now CPU Core temps are hovering around the 25 degree Celcius mark, not bad for a stock intel fan... even under heavy load they only get to the high 50's... getting better cooling though eventually

[Dan~]

If you want energy efficency just buy a laptop and charge round a friends house

[neufuse Veteran]

If you want energy efficency just buy a laptop and charge round a friends house

*hits head on desk* I take it you didn't read this thread... this was about making an energy efficient but powerful desktop

[neufuse Veteran]

well after getting my Kingwin LPZ-550 PSU added on my wattage for my system at idle is a whole 40 watts! at 100% CPU usage it is a whole 99 watts

This was after a couple days of burn in testing and such, seemed the more burn in I did the more efficient the system worked... odd but ok

That is a major difference from my X58 system which maxed out at 300 watts at full load and could idle as low as 160 watts on a good day..... but averaged 200-250 watts