Power consumption

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Thixotropic
Posts: 743
Joined: Wed Sep 04, 2019 7:20 pm
Location: Low-Earth Orbit

Power consumption

Post by Thixotropic »

File under: Mildly Interesting

I replaced the UPS on my BI PC with an APC Backups 1000, and it comes with a watt meter showing the load. Here are the typical loads I see running with and without BI. This is an 8-camera system with 3 recording continuously.
  • PC running idle without BI loaded at all: 65 watts, steady as a rock.
  • PC running with BI loaded as a service, no GUI: 76 ~ 77 watts, occasionally jumping to 80.
  • PC running with BI loaded as a service and the GUI displayed: ~84 to 91 watts, with occasional dips or jumps.

So on my PC, running just BI as a service with no GUI displayed consumes about ~15 watts or so.
Running/showing the GUI takes another 8 to 15 watts, with a rough average of around 10 watts.

Now of course this is a super simplistic measurement and there are a dozen other factors that could be (are) fiddling with the numbers a bit, but all in all they seem consistent over quite a few reboots and reloads.

Also, running with and without the frame maximized seemed like it might lower the power consumption by about a watt, but it could be my imagination. It just seems like it runs a tad higher with the frames showing.
Blue Iris 5.x x64 | Windows 10 Pro x64 | 16GB RAM | i7-7700 3.6 GHz | 1TB HDD | 2TB RAID NAS | 9 Cameras | Almost Dual NIC | 2KVA UPS
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