Profiling the Power Usage of a Desktop PC

Posted Dec 18, 2008 5:00 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
Parent article: Profiling the Power Usage of a Desktop PC

For additional experiments, try measuring watts with different desktop software! I did some informal measurements about a year ago with my home machine, and found that the difference between KDE and a spartan IceWM desktop was about 10W when the user was doing nothing (however, even the lower load was about 220W in this power hog with 3.4 Ghz Pentium D). I guess with KDE it was running more background tasks that kept waking up the processor.