23W savings with PSU swap

amyhughes · Post by **amyhughes** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:18 am

Here are the results of today's power supply swap. I replaced an old 380W Antec (from the first Sonata case) with a Sparkle 250W 80+.

idle at windows desktop: 105W -> 82W
prime95 max-power torture: 137W -> 112W
gaming, low polygon, high framerate: 130W -> 108W
gaming, high polygon, low framerate: 125W -> 102W
brief power-on spike: 142W -> 113W
standby: 6W -> 3W
off: 6W -> 2W

The closest I do to gaming is Second Life, so that's where those numbers came from. It's an environment where content comes from players, so it isn't optimized like most games. There is high polygon count and way too many large textures.

In another thread I posted results of a CPU swap. In total, my load power usage has gone from 158W to 112W and idle 105W to 82W.

Here's the system:

E8400 3.0 GHz (375x8) 1.05V
Ninja rev B, fanless
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
G.Skill 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 800
MSI nVidia 8600GT 512M, fanless
WD 160 GB HDD
Gigabyte i-RAM w/ 4 x 0.5G DDR 400
M-Audio Audiophile 24/96
Samsung DL DVD burner
Antec Sonata with Nexus 120mm exhaust and
the Ninja's 120mm Scythe fan intake
WinXP Pro

drees · Post by **drees** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 12:26 pm

Nice results!

Do you know the specific model number of your old Antec?

Where did you get your Sparkle?

amyhughes · Post by **amyhughes** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 12:33 pm

drees wrote:Do you know the specific model number of your old Antec?

True 380S

Where did you get your Sparkle?

Provantage. It came without any retail packaging, spec sheet, instructions, etc. I don't know if that's how power supplies are typically sold, but that's what I got from provantage.

buy.com also sells it, and seems, in fact, the cheepest source.