Good info thx.

The odd thing is that I'll be a lot of older systems are just as expensive. I think the old 90nm P-4's were 140watt CPUs. RAM and Hard drives have decreased in voltage as well, but I haven't really noticed what their total watts consumed is/was. Modern power supplies are often 80% efficient, and sometimes 85%. 65% efficiency used to be pretty standard. That made some old 300 PSU,s actually burn through 583 watts where a new 500 watt PSU that's 85% efficient will take 588 watts to power it. I hazard to think about LCD vs CRT wattage.

I think the important thing to realize is that the bulk of the electicity cost comes from when we aren't useing the system. Even if we just let it sit idle, that's $0.03 / per hour which is $0.72 / day, which is $21.60 a month or $262.80 a year. For those of us with multiple PC's, this can really add up.