| Joined: | Mon Apr 2nd, 2012 |
| Location: | South Lakeland, UK |
| Posts: | 4066 |
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http://nikondslr.uk/view_topic.php?id=1550&forum_id=2&page=2
Firstly I am miserly with my household electric consumption. No TV, cook and heat with gas, heating thermostat set at 16ºC, upstairs, etc. All my lighting is LED. Therefore the computer, which I use intensively, is by far the largest single user of electric. I have come to the conclusion it's a price worth paying. According to my electric supply company I am among the lowest 10% of electric consumers in my locality.
One of the calculations I ran in my spreadsheet was how many months/years would it take to save the cost of purchasing an economic iMac for £400 (used of course, off eBay?) and use that for 50% of my computer usage. It was coming out at about five to six years, I doubt a £400 iMac would last five or six years, even if it did it would be out of date by then and the expenditure was lost (so no £ gain).
My MacPro is a solid, modular workhorse which I believe is better left running 24/7. It's proving perfectly capable of handling the massive files my new D800 produces, the Photoshop TIFF files are between 350 and 450Mb each and they don't cause the MacPro to slow or falter in the slightest. Even if one module fails it's easy to replace, processor boards slide in and out, even the power supply is accessible, spares are easy to obtain.
The only issue I have had was when in Lightroom, I tried to do an HDR with twelve D800 NEF images with widely varying exposures, the MacPro froze. I only realised because the seconds stopped clicking by on the clock in the screen header, that's why I have seconds displayed in the clock. It's the first time I have seen that happen for years! I re-started the computer, ran the process again and it worked perfectly, I think the RAM buffer/cash may have been full and not cleared properly.
I have found by 'un-mounting' the large spinning drives, that reduces the power consumption, I am gradually installing SSD's and using them for the main drive and working storage, I keep the current year image files and current general data on SSD, all the older stuff is accessible with a couple of clicks to re-mount the appropriate un-mounted spinning drive. At the moment in day to day use, the only spinning drive is the 3Tb Time Machine drive and that's set to sleep between it's hourly backup sessions.
I turn my screens off at night, the overnight consumption is tiny, I haven't calculated hourly but it's probably 5% of active daytime consumption.
I am of course still monitoring the overall consumption and as a result of my un-mounting various spinning drives and switching off the screens while I am not actually using them, the consumption is a little lower I have reduced it from 55% to 45% of the household consumption, over the last six months.
To date, since I started monitoring the computer's consumption it has used 473.2kW of electric, @ £0.15 per kW = £70.98, that's for about 6 months (15 July- 30 December) So if I bought an iMac and put up with the limitations, I might save £70 per year, but it would cost me £1500+ for a used iMac which would even start to approach the performance of my 'ancient' but powerful MacPro.
So, there you have it!
Attachment: 2018 Electric graph.jpg (Downloaded 15 times)
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Robert.