MAC / PC power consumption comparison

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LongLensPhotography

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It is becoming a big thing since you PC or mac gear can be one of the top power consumers in your office or home

My Ryzen 5600X 3060TI build is using somewhere around 100-150W doing ordinary things or nothing at all, on top of my monitor at around 50-60W. That's up to 1600Whr on a long day.

Samsung i7 12th gen laptop will be around 50-60W + monitor but clearly it is not as powerful and sadly very considerably noisier than a whisper quiet desktop, which totally annoys me. So it would be a pretty emergency option to do serious work on it.

I wonder if anyone measured power usage of any other devices and recent Macs. Something like Mac studio would be particularly interesting.

Of course one would also consider if an upgrade to Ryzen 7000 or intel 13th gen desktop system (when released) would increase or decrease near IDLE power usage in any significant way. You only really need the full potential when exporting, running AI apps or doing video work. Casual LR / PS is pretty low on recent CPU and GPU, and heavy on RAM / SSD.

I doubt you can do much to find a less "hungry" 27-32" monitor. Maybe newest mini-LED or AMOLED ones are, but they are still like £4K!
 
The M1 macs use very little power. I don't know the exact numbers and I'm sure if you do a bit of googling you will find some numbers. I did lookup the numbers for iMAcs when deciding to change and they were quite easy to find.

I used to run two iMacs side by side. One was a 2k 2012 which was used as a second monitor and the other a 2015 5k machine. As these were my business machines and turning them on, sorting out the Target Display mode to get the second screen going and then opening all my apps and websites in the correct layout was a big pain in the arse, they were on 24/7.
They went to sleep and the screens blanked but they were powered on all the time.

Recently I replaced those two iMacs with a M1 Mini and two BenQ 2K displays. Boot up time is a few seconds and with the new Shortcuts app I can open all my apps and websites with the click of one button which means that this machine runs Monday to Friday 8:30am to 4:30pm. They are turned off every night.

I also have a M1 Studio which is used occasionally when I'm doing photo related stuff.

My electricity bill dropped around £40/month and has consistently remained around £40 less than it used to be.

Edit:

iMac power consumption here https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201918
Mini's here https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201897
 
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Pound for pound Id say macs are generally better on power consumption but good thing about pc building is you can make a seriously powerful one that hammers the national grid or a milder one that sips leccy.
 
My Mac Studio uses very little power

Screenshot 2022-09-05 at 18.05.59.png

Not very useful in the winter, unlike my sons PC that warms his room up very nicely.
 
Nikon f1.8 said:
My Mac Studio uses very little power

View attachment 366093

Not very useful in the winter, unlike my sons PC that warms his room up very nicely.
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Mine is not like a portable heater. In any case a warm keyboard and mouse would be kind of cool!
 
That data is very informative. I have a 2015 iMac that is constantly on (sleeping most of the time just used a short while each evening and at weekends), consuming it would appear 70w. That needs to change, and if I get a new contract then an M1 Mini or better is on the cards!
 
Don't forget that what the GPU is doing makes a big difference. So some spec charts might be just using the idle power draw.
 
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for most of my home stuff , i actually use a T640 HP terminal , almost a small footprint PC it uses a tiny amount of power something like 18w and with my 27 inch ACER screen i wold be surprised if it uses 50w in total , anything i connect to is virtual or web based so it requires almost zero local power.
 
lindsay said:
That data is very informative. I have a 2015 iMac that is constantly on (sleeping most of the time just used a short while each evening and at weekends), consuming it would appear 70w. That needs to change, and if I get a new contract then an M1 Mini or better is on the cards!
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I'm on a 2009 iMac and looks to use over a 100w in idle, looks like it's time to start turning it off when not in use.
 
Mr Bump said:
for most of my home stuff , i actually use a T640 HP terminal , almost a small footprint PC it uses a tiny amount of power something like 18w and with my 27 inch ACER screen i wold be surprised if it uses 50w in total , anything i connect to is virtual or web based so it requires almost zero local power.
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Not many people will be in the situation of only needing a thin client though.
 
onomatopoeia said:
Not many people will be in the situation of only needing a thin client though.
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you would be surprised it does full office suite anything web related, plays fubar2000 they have come a long way, mine has a 2tb NVME drive and 16gb ram

actually *edit mine is the T640
the massive bonus is there have zero moving parts so are absolutely silent

www.storagereview.com

HP t640 Thin Client Review

the HP t640 Thin Cliets is a very powerful VDI client that supports all the major VDI protocols as well as some niche ones
www.storagereview.com www.storagereview.com
 
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Mr Bump said:
you would be surprised it does full office suite anything web related, plays fubar2000 they have come a long way, mine has a 2tb NVME drive and 16gb ram
Click to expand...

Doesn't a thin client just shift most of the processing and power consumption off to the virtual desktop host, though? It's just being used in a data centre rather than your house.
 
That's what I thought - it's how I've used them in the past and very similar to my Chromebook.
 
I'm preparing a passively cooled desktop PC using a 15W AMD laptop CPU. It started life as an Asus NUC clone but that had a horribly noisy fan so I transplanted the innards into an Akasa Turing fanless case. It's probably three times the volume of the original case (and 10x the weight) but it's silent.....
 
Musicman said:
Doesn't a thin client just shift most of the processing and power consumption off to the virtual desktop host, though? It's just being used in a data centre rather than your house.
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i'm not using it as a cloud/thin client its just a very low power pc
 
My sons gaming PC consumption has doubled since upgrading the GPU, I noticed that the Ryzen processor itself consumes very little tbh, certainly a lot less than my old 2500k.
 
Neilc28 said:
My sons gaming PC consumption has doubled since upgrading the GPU, I noticed that the Ryzen processor itself consumes very little tbh, certainly a lot less than my old 2500k.
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What GPU did he get?
 
Neilc28 said:
Went from a 1050 to a 3060, so quite a leap tbh
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Nice, I'm looking to upgrade to go max out on VR but not at the current prices, which seem to be increasing again. Crazy. My current card plays everything, so I can wait.
 
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