As an update and possibly a point of reference for above post.... I swapped my PSU for an 80+ 400W (OCZ Stealth Extreme) and the system now idles at 65W @ the wall. As for the above - my chipset idles at 57ºC alas I do not do much work that uses the iGPU yet so cant give you an upper range, but wit...

Righty. To wrap this up. I just installed a OCZ 400SXS (Stealth Extreme). I know this is only 80+ (not bronze, silver or gold) and my system sits well under 20% of its load, but it was on offer so i went for it. The system now draws 65W. A saving of about 10W or a saving of ~13% compared to the old ...

I have just built a system around one. Asus P5N7A-VM Intel Q9400 8GB PC2-6400 (4 x 2GB) 2 x Spinpoint F1 500GB SATA 2 x WD 80GB PATA 1 x DVD-RW and a second Netgear NIC. It idles around ~75W and pulls ~125W running 4 instances of cpuburn. These readings are at the wall, on an old (and presumably ine...

I should also ask, why are all the 80+ gold PSU's all in the >800W range?

Is it just easier to get efficiency there or is it that the market segment is larger at that end of the scale.

Thanks! I had never considered Fan swaps on PSU's, it seems good advice. At the moment I am looking at either the HEC Green Earth HEC-350TE which is dirt cheap at £27 or the OCZ 400W ModXStream Pro at £45. I have never seen the Pico PSU's before, they look a great idea, but not suitable for my app...

Well its not a 'typical' home server doling out the occasional mp3 or mpeg file. Its more a server, based at home. The P4 with 4Gb had run out of steam, I was going to go E8400 but I really can use all the cores. Without boring people too much, when I say 'idle' its idling Ubuntu, Solaris, MS Vista,...

I just replaced my P4 2.8 which was drawing ~125W @ Idle with something altogether more appropriate: Asus P5N7A-VM Intel Q9400 8GB DDR2 800Mhz RAM I kept my old disks: 2 x 500GB SATA (Samsung HD502IJ) 2 x 80GB IDE I am pleased to say the least, it is much, much faster and draws much, much less power...