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by upofadown10 hours ago |
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upvoteby 1970-01-0110 hours ago|
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Your electricity bill alone could justify the cost of a new computer purchase if you're not shutting that down after every session.
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upvoteby einr10 hours ago|
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65W TDP? Let's say we want to run a PC so we're switching to a newer low-end Ryzen with a 35W TDP and that that's a 30W difference for the whole system. Let's say we're running the system 24/7 and the CPU is pulling its full TDP constantly. Average US residential electricity price is $0.18/kWh.

0.03 kW * 24 h * 365 d * $0.18 = $47.30/year

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upvoteby cjs_ac10 hours ago|
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In the UK, residential electricity tariffs are currently capped by the regulator at 27.69p per kWh, resulting in a total yearly cost of £72.77. Much higher than in the US, but still much cheaper than a new PC.
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upvoteby 1970-01-019 hours ago|
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£72.77 is more than enough for a PC: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/377057425659
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upvoteby Aurornis8 hours ago|
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PC power draw at the wall is different than TDP. Idle power goes to a lot of components.

Even CPU TDP is not an accurate measure. My latest AMD CPU will pull more than it’s rated “TDP” under certain loads.

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upvoteby einr7 hours ago|
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Yup. But from the OP, all the information we have is the CPU model, and the GP decided that was enough to say it should be thrown in the trash for power inefficiency, so I thought it was enough for some bad math.

(FWIW, searching for the CPU model brings up an old review where the full system they’re testing pulls 145W under some amount of load. While that’s not nothing, it’s also not outrageous for a desktop PC that does the desktop PC things you require of it.)

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upvoteby 1970-01-019 hours ago|
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So $50/yr for 4 years gives you ~$150 with $50 extra for shipping or whatever, which gets you a decent Lenovo M700 Tiny with much better performance in both power and power consumption.
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upvoteby einr9 hours ago|
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I guess. It's hardly an open-and-shut case of "throw your old computer away!" though, especially when this is a worst-case scenario of running a desktop computer at full blast 24/7 without it ever going into sleep mode or being turned off, and when you don't know what the user's needs are. Maybe a mini-PC with basically no expansion just won't really work for them?
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upvoteby intrikate8 hours ago|
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Watts in TDP are not the same as watts in electricity, although they're both measures of energy.

TDP is a thermal measurement, it's how much heat energy your heatsink and fan need to be able to dissipate to keep the unit within operational temperatures. It does not directly correlate to the amount of electricity consumed in operation.

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upvoteby einr7 hours ago|
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I know, but it should be roughly correlated and only serves as comparison for wildly inaccurate napkin math anyway.
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upvoteby nehal3m7 hours ago|
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It’s close enough. Computers mostly make heat with some math as a distant second.
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upvoteby upofadown4 hours ago|
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An interesting point. Some random measurement gets 49W idle[1] which is probably close enough. I don't constantly compile stuff or stream video. At my local electricity rate of $0.072/kWh that works out to $31USD/year.

New systems idle at something like 25 Watts according to a lazy search. So 49-25=24W. That works out to $15/year hypothetically saved by going to a newer system. But I live in a cold climate and the heating season is something like half the year. But I only pay something like half as much for gas heat as opposed to electric heat. So let's just knock a quarter off and end up with 15-(15/4)=$11.25USD hypothetically saved per year. I will leave it here as I don't know how much the hypothetical alternative computer would cost and, as already mentioned, I don't care.

[1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/athlon-ii-x2-250-vs-ath...

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upvoteby SeanAnderson10 hours ago|
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Someone's never tried to locally compile a Rust program. :)
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upvoteby ahartmetz1 hours ago|
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Or C++. I buy fairly fast computers to compile stuff. Generally top of the line desktop hardware because Threadripper isn't as much better as it's more expensive (and annoying to cool!), so the next price point that makes sense is a highly clocked (because single thread also matters) Epyc for like 10k€.

I also do caching and distributed compilation with sccache.

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upvoteby antisthenes6 hours ago|
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Did any of the components fail over time?

HDD/SSD?

Pretty surprising to have this thing still be working 17 years later, unless it spent a good chunk of that in 'cold storage'.

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upvoteby upofadown5 hours ago|
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Well it has a SSD in it now so it must have gone through at least one actual hard drive...
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