[ale] screen saver eats 15 - 30 watts

Tue Apr 2 14:23:28 EDT 2013

Ah. But I like the BSOD screen saver :-) Looks like the box locked up. The
flying toasters screen saver company went out of business because of the
BSOD wallpaper. As admins in the big corp world would walk through and see
EVERY system had crashed at lunch... and proceed to pull the power cord and
cold restart. Pretty soon the mandate went out that no more Flying Toasters
screen saver was allowed.

However, I use a screen blank and lock with power off screen in 15 minutes.

Even in power off mode, the monitor draws a bit of power waiting for the
switch press or data to reappear. But it nothing compared to the TV or xbox.

I miss _REAL_ power switches. You know - when off meant OFF.

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 12:15 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) <
atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> wrote:

> **
> I never have liked the blank screen concept, since it's harder to tell if
> the machine is still running or is locked up or something.  But, it might
> save another few watts as you said.
>
> Ron
>
>
> On 4/2/2013 11:39 AM, Scott Bragg wrote:
>
> You might try the 'blank screen' screen saver and see if it drops it even
> more.   Anything you do with the system that produces animations is going
> to use more power than just blanking the screen and displaying nothing.
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Ron Frazier (ALE) <
> atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been monitoring my desktop computer that I mentioned in the litecoin
>> thread.  I have a great little device attached to the power cord called a
>> kill-a-watt ez, which you can buy at Home Depot.  This device tabulates
>> both instantaneous power consumption (every second) and long term power
>> consumption over a period of time, as well as cost to operate whatever is
>> plugged into it.
>>
>> At any given time, the numbers vary quite a bit, but you can get a sense
>> of the average.
>>
>> When I came in, this morning, I noticed the numbers were higher than they
>> typically were in its steady state mode.  I did some testing and found that
>> the screen saver was consuming 15 - 30 W.  I should note that there is 100
>> W difference in power consumption between idling my CPU and maxing it out.
>>  So, the screen saver is apparently taxing the cpu and gpu a bit.
>>
>> At $ .097 / kwh, it costs $ 7 / mo to run a 100 W (or .1 KW) load for 24
>> hours / day for 30 days.
>>
>> So, just running the screen saver is potentially costing me $ 2 / mo.
>>  It's not going to break the bank, but there's no point in wasting that
>> energy and money.  My monitors are LCD's, which are not susceptible to
>> burn-in.  So, I don't care what the screen saver it doing.  It's more of a
>> lock screen.
>>
>> The screen saver I was using is mystify (windows).  It puts fancy curvy
>> geometric lines on the screen which continually move and change.  It looks
>> cool.  I changed it to a slowly moving line of text which shows the
>> computer name.  This text is a solid color, and I turned off the
>> "reflections" effect, which requires lots of 3d graphics computations.
>>
>> My power consumption now actually drops by a couple of W when the screen
>> saver is on.
>>
>> So, if you have a fancy smancy 3d screen saver running on a big computer,
>> or several big computers, maybe with multiple monitors, you might want to
>> look at how much power it's consuming.
>>
>> Just thought I'd pass this along.  Hope it's helpful.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> Ron
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9
>> Mail.
>> Please excuse my potential brevity if I'm typing on the touch screen.
>>
>> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
>> call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
>> mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very
>> quickly.)
>>
>> Ron Frazier
>> 770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
>> linuxdude AT techstarship.com
>>
>>
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>
>
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>
> --
>
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
> call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
> mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)
>
> Ron Frazier
> 770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT techstarship.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>

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