Justifying our spending...

[mrbios]

Seems this lovely 8-9k we'll be saving on the microsoft licenses is being taken away from us

 

When we got angry about it they asked us to justify why we would need it, i wanted some opinion as to whether this was a valid justification:

Currently we have a lot of pcs using 95w processors and all using conventional hard drives, i think i've worked out that the standard idle power draw of these machines is around 170w

 

My argument to them is that we can save them all the money we'll be spending on electricity, which turns that one large spend into a yearly saving rather than simply saving it in this years budgets.

 

By replacing those PCs with the, yet to be released, i3 2300T 35w edition processor and solid state hard drives we could reduce the power draw to closer to 70-80w per PC (the watt figures are complete estimates by the way, feel free to correct me if im likely miles off the mark!) saving the school £100s in electricity year on year.

 

Is there any other way of justifying that money being left in our budget? Am i even right in thinking the above?

[DAZZD88]

If it's in your budget, they shouldn't be taing it off you full stop. At least that's my understandingof budgets.

[mrbios]

If they do it'll be a total of around £16k they've taken off us this year from the original pot. :/

[AngryTechnician]

i think i've worked out that the standard idle power draw of these machines is around 170w

I think that figure is a probably significantly higher than the real figure, unless you're using CRTs still. Buy a meter from Maplin and measure some of them. I did, and even my most power hungry machines were only using 85W for the base unit.

 

A CRT was using about 60W in use, but even the nastiest LCDs I had were only 28.5W, while the new ones were 18.5W. All the LCDs used less than 0.5W when in standby.

 

My figures for a Dell Optiplex 360 running Windows 7 with a 17" LCD came to a total of 63.5W in use, 2.3W in sleep, and 1.7W in Hibernate. If I turn the monitor off completely, I save another 0.5W.

[this_is_gav]

Indeed. When idle, even an oldish system with a Core 2 Duo 3.1GHz, 4GB RAM and a mechanical hard drive uses around 65W even with a dedicated graphics card (an ATI HD 4670).

 

Under full 3D load, the same system uses 110W - all minus a monitor.

 

Taken from a Hexus.net graphics card review, here.

 

Maybe an old Prescott-era Pentium 4 would suck a bit more juice (they were infamously thirsty), but I'd be surprised if even they used up more than 120W or so when idle.

[mrbios]

The old computers in question are pentium Ds with a TDP of 95w, maybe im getting the wrong end of the stick with the meaning of "TDP"?

[hakko]

Agree with above to measure the idle consumption of a machine. My VERY rough calc is about 5p per machine per day.

 

Also an energy efficient light bulb may save X amount. But if it costs £30 to buy, how many years will it take to recover that amount? Better to wait for the original bulb to die before replacing.

 

I don't know if there is an update to this but SSD may not be that much efficient:

Conclusion : The SSD Power Consumption Hoax

[this_is_gav]

TDP is realistically the maximum watts a CPU could draw (though it could be higher with some specific uses).

 

By the looks of it, the top end Pentium Ds idled at around 150w at the wall with a Geforce 6800 ultra, which takes up 30w when idling. With onboard or low-end graphics, I'd guess around 130W tops.

[srochford]

If it's in your budget, they shouldn't be taing it off you full stop. At least that's my understandingof budgets.

 

It's in the budget for a particular purpose (eg buying Microsoft Licenses) If that purpose no longer exists (MS licenses got cheaper) then it's totally appropriate for it to go back in the central pot and for everyone to have a chance to bid for the money.

 

Pretty much every department in a school will have put forward budget requests and been told "sorry; not enough money" - this now gives all of them a second chance to say "well, I need £xx to do yyyyy" and for senior management to evaluate them all and pick the best use for the money.

 

It may well be that they will opt to buy new PCs (although I'm not sure that the cost saving on the basis of power saving is likely to sway things).