lower power PCs

[ddl@danlan.*com (Dan Lanciani)]

For some time I've been using an old Dell Optiplex P3/600 for some home
control and A/V functions.  It is a big tower with a number of PCI and
ISA cards, three older hard drives, and a CDROM.  I was always pleased
that it lights no LEDs on the power scale of the 1000VA UPS to which it
is attached.

I wanted a little more CPU power to allow for some MPEG transcoding so
I'm replacing the Optiplex with a more modern P4/3GHz machine with
two recent hard drives, a DVDR and an FX5200 video card.  (Everything
else is on the ASUS P4C motherboard.  This "new" machine is a few years
old, but much newer than the Dell.)

I was a little disturbed that the "new" machine lit two LEDs on the
UPS, so I got out my genuine glass-cased watt-hour meter.  Turns out
that the old Dell draws about 60W while the new machine draws 140W.  Ok,
I realize the "new" machine is a lot faster but I thought efficiency
improvements had at least somewhat offset this.  Am I being unrealistic
or should I be able to do better?

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl@danlan.*com