Some more power consumption numbers

We had a power meter lying around my new office and a different variety of stuff from last time, so here's some more power consumption numbers.

First, for a random assortment of stuff:

Allied Telesyn FS705-LE 5-port Ethernet switch	3 watts
Allied Telesyn FS750 16-port Ethernet switch	7 watts
Sun SunFire X2100 1U server, powered off	6 watts
SunFire X2100 powering on	130 watts and a lot of noise
Dell 1907FP LCD displaying stuff	26 watts
Dell 1907FP in powersave with no signal	2 watts

Next, for a 2.4 Ghz Intel Celeron on a VIA CN400/PM800 based motherboard in a more or less generic case with a more or less generic 40Gb IDE drive, running Ubuntu Linux:

powered off	3 watts
idle at the Ubuntu Gnome login screen	75 watts
CPU usage at 100%	120 watts

Finally, for one of my main M2N4-SLI machines:

powered off	3 watts
in the BIOS's hardware monitor screen	122 watts
idle, either text or graphics	98 watts
in the Gnome screensaver	120 watts
streaming disk reads from one drive	125 watts
streaming disk reads from two drives	137 watts
one core busy with a CPU soaker	128 watts
both cores busy with CPU soakers	155 watts
both cores busy and streaming writes to a software RAID-1	158 watts
both cores busy and one drive doing streaming reads	158 watts
both cores busy and both drives doing streaming reads	162 watts

The streaming disk reads took about 10% of the (dual core) CPU for one drive and 21% for two drives, all in system time according to vmstat and procinfo. Streaming writes use a significant amount of CPU all on their own, so I only ran them with the CPU soakers active.

Interestingly enough, the power figures suggest that writing to the software RAID-1 filesystem (which was actually LVM on top of a RAID-1) was not actually driving both disks simultaneously. Possibly the Linux kernel bursts writes back and forth between the drives.

Sidebar: the boring hardware details

The M2N4-SLI machine that I measured has an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ CPU in an ASUS M2N4-SLI motherboard, 2GB of memory, two 320GB Seagate SATA drives, an Enermax Liberty 500 watt power supply, and an ATI X800 GT PCIe graphics card. I'm not going to try the ATI binary drivers this time around, so I have no figures for that.

I don't know what exact hardware the Celeron box is built from; it is a more or less generic box that we happened to have lying around.