Power consumption of next gen Amiga...

So.... with the energy crisis in Europe I became curious about the power consumption of a next gen Amiga.... I have ordered a meter for it, but it will not arrive until mid next week.

My machine has the following hardware....
AX5000 Motherboard (020)

Radeon RX550 GFX board (PCIe)
HD compatible Audioboard (PCIe)
100 MBit Ethernet card (PCI)
4x SATA expansion (PCI)

1x DVD Reader/Burner (internal SATA)
1x 2TB 3.5" Harddrive (internal SATA)
1x 2TB 3.5" Harddrive (connected to the PCI SATA card)

How much does your next gen Amiga draw in idle mode as well as power mode? Power mode would be when you for example play a demanding game such as Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy or Doom 3.

Prefs/Powersettings did not change any power consumption for regular 2D usage of programs such as Odyssey or Rave. So I left it to HIGH setting to make sure the games that uses GPU performs as good as they can. The numbers below are the peaks I could see on the meter.

Stand by (computer turned off, PSU turned on to give some power to motherboard): 0.9W

Idle with WB booted: 70.7W
Quake 1 CPU Rendering 800x600: 70.7W
Rave encoding to MP3, VBR Quality 5 (1h 47m stereo wav-file) Encoding time: 9m 14s: 70.7W

Onto some CPU & GPU usage then...

Jedi Outcast GL4es, 800x600: 80.0W
Return to Castle Wolfenstein GL4es, 1920x1080: 86.6W

What surprised me most is that there is no difference in power consumption when stressing the CPU. Another thing to add is that the CPU stayed at a stable 60 Celsius. But this puzzles me a bit... any idea of why stressing the CPU doesn't draw more power?

I also wonder why my idle power consumption is so much higher compared to some of the other tests in this thread? My guess is the 2x mechanical SATA harddrives. Any thoughts on that?

@Cageman

only 2gb hardrives? dosent sound like next gen amiga. why not using sdd disks instead. even lower power consumption?

@noXLar

Good catch.... it is 2x 2TB harddrives. :) And no SSD at this point. I have edited my initial post with this information.

EDIT: The reason why no SSD... my SAM460ex which has to use a PCI based SATA card is not fast at all compared to the internal ports on the X5000. The X5000 has the same slowdown when using a PCI based SATA card.

My X1000 draws about 50 Watt (idle) to 80 Watt (load). So I guess it will be maybe 100 Watt max. on your System.

@Cageman

hehe look better now:)

i also use 4port pci on sam460ex. but only because crappy onboard ports and so few of them. but i can't remember they ever been slow.

@Cageman Quote:
My X5020 which is in a Fractal Core 2500 case (three fans; fan controller in middle setting) takes 57W when idle... I have in my machine a Radeon HD 6450 (with fan), a couple of SSD disks and a 1 TB mechanical HD, a Soundblaster Live! (PCI), an Ethernet (PCIe) and a Sata/USB controller (PCIe) board.

I do not have any demanding game in my machine to test...

@DJBase

Is that with your gfx board?

How typical.... it is now end of "next week" and I have now got information that my meter will arrive on Monday next week. It seems a lot of people are buying these things now to measure how much their electrical stuff draws in order to save power usage.

Nice to see the comments. Keep em comming. :)

@Gregor

I still have a PCIe slot left (the mini one)... you say you have a SATA/USB controller hooked to one of those slots. What brand etc are you using for that? The PCI based controller I have for the extra SATA ports are probably 20 times slower compared to the two internal slots on the AX5000. I wonder how fast PCIe is compard to regular PCI. :)

@Cageman
Quote:
It is this one:
https://www.reichelt.com/de/en/pcie-x1 ... delock-89389-p180132.html

But it is useful only with Linux as there are no AmigaOS drivers for it! There are no faster Sata controller boards available for AmigaOS than those ancient Sata1 controllers (Sil 3112/3114/3512), due to the lack of drivers.

@Raziel

Quote:

Yes, complete system but I will test with load again.

@Gregor

Quote:

This should work with your video card.

http://www.goldencode.de/download.php ... _RadeonHD_Compositing.lha

@Rob
Quote:
I was not able to download it with any browser... Could you please place it somewhere accessible at least with Odyssey? Thanks!

@Gregor

Sorry I didn't verify if the download still worked.

Try this one instead.

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfil ... e/action/wingsbf_rhdc.lha

@Rob
Quote:
Thanks! Got it downloaded now...

The power consumption was 59-60w during the first mission, so there was only a 2-3w rise. Tested also BubleShooter DX, it gave 60w, too.

I have now updated the opening post with my measures (so you do not have to scroll up and down to see my hardware list + the powerdraw). :)

@Cageman
Quote:

It is probably mostly due to the graphics card. RX 550 cards have a TBP of 50W, whereas for my HD 6450 that value is only 18W.