I found a great price ($18, free shipping) on Amazon last month for a "Kill A Watt" power meter, and this thing is a lot of fun. You plug it into an outlet and then plug the item under test into it. Its LCD display shows volts, amps, power consumed, power factor, and can even keep a running summary of KW/Hrs consumed. Supposedly it's very accurate, too.
My big 24" LCD monitor eats 66 watts, which is probably a lot better than my old 21" Trinitron monitor. My overclocked AMDx2 system with a half-dozen drives and 2GB of ram consumes 170w when loafing and 210 when running Prime95, a worst-case scenario (doing an MPEG2 render it eats 190w).
Given the inefficiency of the power supply (probably around 75%), this implies to me that my system only needs about 150w running full-tilt, far less than the 600w supply could deliver. I did notice, however, that on startup the consumption jumps significantly for a few seconds, I guess as the drives spin up. I also have a wimpy video card; some cards could probably consume that kind of power all by themselves.
My big 24" LCD monitor eats 66 watts, which is probably a lot better than my old 21" Trinitron monitor. My overclocked AMDx2 system with a half-dozen drives and 2GB of ram consumes 170w when loafing and 210 when running Prime95, a worst-case scenario (doing an MPEG2 render it eats 190w).
Given the inefficiency of the power supply (probably around 75%), this implies to me that my system only needs about 150w running full-tilt, far less than the 600w supply could deliver. I did notice, however, that on startup the consumption jumps significantly for a few seconds, I guess as the drives spin up. I also have a wimpy video card; some cards could probably consume that kind of power all by themselves.