With my little Kill-a-watt power monitor, I decided to see what kind of power draw my flagship--
the Blue Dragon--draws. I decided to include monitors and sound system for completeness. The results: The base draw of the Blue-Dragon at idle with both monitors on is 475 watts--300 of this is just for the tower. That's fairly significant but may very well be lower then the base for the Red-Dragon when it had both CPUs. But I wanted to know how bad things could get. The CPU gets hotter when it's doing more work, and heat requires energy. So I decided to fully load the CPU by doing a little
Einstein@Home. My sound system is rated for 505 watts continious. Most of that power goes to driving the sub-woofer. So I needed something with a lot of base. I tried verious songs before it dawned on me that I have
Audacity, which can generate tones. A note of about 30 hertz with the base and volume cranked was enough for my roommate to hear the sidding on the house shake when outside. With all of this going on, I held an energy draw of 700 watts, peaking around 750. About the only way I think it could be worse is by loading the video card too--but for now, that's a big number. The base can easilly add 200 watts of draw, but I never saw it do pull 500. Anyway, fun experement.