Power saving on a modern PC

[PARANOiA]

Back in the day I disabled all power saving modes on my PC due to the (supposed) performance impacts. I think I even went through a stage where I uninstalled all ACPI hardware in Device Manager. Now it's a bit of a different world - not me mention I'm paying my own power bills now - and I'm wondering what's "normal" for a modern PC?

I currently have a desktop that's on 24/7. My LCD switches to power-saving mode after half an hour but that's it. My HDD's (five of them) never power down since I don't like the drive whirring up and locking my PC - not to mention not being great for the drive.

Are suspend or hibernate options viable for quick powersavings these days? Can I run my PC in a low power mode that still has network activity for overnight downloads, software updates and whatnot? How is performance - desktop or gaming - impacted by changing some of these options?

 

[Simon F]

My HDD's (five of them) never power down since I don't like the drive whirring up and locking my PC - not to mention not being great for the drive.

Are suspend or hibernate options viable for quick powersavings these days?

Sorry? You are considering suspend/hibernate yet don't like the drives to power down because they take time to spin up again!

 

[PARANOiA]

Sorry? You are considering suspend/hibernate yet don't like the drives to power down because they take time to spin up again!

Hibernate/suspend is more of a long-term/overnight thing. With 5 drives in my PC, drives will start up and spin down during regular use - say, my MP3 drive when new podcasts are updated every hour or so. I see that as being vastly different from a daily shutdown.

Make sense?

 

[Simon F]

Hibernate/suspend is more of a long-term/overnight thing. With 5 drives in my PC, drives will start up and spin down during regular use - say, my MP3 drive when new podcasts are updated every hour or so. I see that as being vastly different from a daily shutdown.

Make sense?

OK. I was assuming you meant to allow the power saving to go into suspend/hibernate mode after some period of time.

I certainly use the hibernate mode on my laptop as it is (well, used to be) much faster than a full shutdown and restart. I say "used to be" because the laptop now has full disk encryption and saving out and restoring an encrypted x GB file takes in the order of a couple of minutes!

(In normal use, I guess the encryption is done in the background so you don't tend to notice it but you certainly do when there is nothing else that can be running).

 

[Sxotty]

Yeah hibernate used to be very fast, but on my new laptop with 3gb ram and a slow hdd it takes forever.

If you are running Vista it has new power saving modes as well.

Sleep is really, really fast. I don't know how much power you save though.

Also mine doesn't quite work right 100% of the time b/c when my video card died I just swapped in another of the same brand from a different generation and I think the driver is a bit confused, or maybe the older card just doesn't deal with it as well.

 

[Richard]

Hibernate/suspend is more of a long-term/overnight thing. With 5 drives in my PC, drives will start up and spin down during regular use - say, my MP3 drive when new podcasts are updated every hour or so. I see that as being vastly different from a daily shutdown.

Make sense?

If you're hybernating/suspending for long-term/overnight why not turn it off completely? Heck, I turn it off whenever I know I'll be AFK for more than 20 mins.

If you want additional savings, turn off the screensaver and set your monitor to go idle at the same timing. Also, replace your five HDDs with two larger ones.

 

[Kyyla]

Sleep (S3) barely uses any power, so no need to really shut down. You won't save much energy unless you also pull the power cord.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Vista uses stand-by mode S3 by default, I got it in XP by changing one power option in the BIOS so no need for vista actually. extremely fast (I had bound it to a hotkey, win+s. keyboard power on), when you power the PC on the music plays right again, instantly.

the hard drive issue annoys me. I would put the PC to sleep for even a toilet break or whatnot but I hate spinning down and up the hard drive every 5 minutes. now I shutdown which is fast anyway, but not often enough (hours rather than minutes). The sleep just wants me to use it often and it's bad for already unreliable hard disks.

I would like a power mode where the PC is like in S3 but hard drives are still spinning for the next 20 minutes.


another nifty thing would be to have a self-built NAS with the lowest power practical CPU (VIA, but better might be SoC x86 or even ARM?). there you put 750GB drives (damn cheap), which ideally could be spun up and down if needed (if there's a back up disk for instance).
Power-on-lan does exist and has a very good use here.
When downloading, serving files, remote access or whatever such as maintening an IRC presence has to been done overnight, you can tell the little NAS PC to stay on. it would be usable through ssh by the way. (on windows, putty and xming to remotely use any unix/linux app)

downloading stuff to a flash drive and copying when the hard drive is back would be possible.

that leads me to another question, does the current SATA standard allows individual spinning up and down of disks? and do some NAS include my idea of deffered spinning down.



or, I could have it faster ! : what about a file server that will also do some if not all of your 24/7 stuff.

better RTC (clock) power-on scheduling would be useful. depending on the BIOS you usually can set one at only one precise day/monther/year/hour, or at the same precise hour every single day of the year. I'd want my PC to switch on at the relevant hours and days, switch on a power plug where there's speakers to play music and coffee brewer to get some dose of legal speed. (No, I don't plan an automated dogfood can opener)
That RTC schedule would even better be updatable from the OS. any info on this?
(else I'd need to hack some clock and look around in my BIOS, I think there's wake-up on COM port event or similar.)

 

[Vadi]

I haven't found a way to spin disks down when I want.
I guess you could setup a diskless client in linux and have it wake up the nfs server in order to provide the boot disk. The client should be able to shutdown the server in many ways too.

 

[PARANOiA]

I've disables S1 in my BIOS now after a bit of reading, and have enabled S3 only. I have Vista auto-sleeping after 20 minutes of inactivity.

Is hibernating the same as S3 Sleep?

 

[Kyyla]

I've disables S1 in my BIOS now after a bit of reading, and have enabled S3 only. I have Vista auto-sleeping after 20 minutes of inactivity.

Is hibernating the same as S3 Sleep?

In vista by default you have hybrid sleep enabled. This means a standby in ram (s3) plus a write to the hard disk in case power is cut (hibernation?).

 

[Kyyla]

I measured power usage from the wall outlet of a pretty typical gaming pc: C2D E8200, 8800gt, Antec 430 NeoHE, 1 hard drive, 1 dvd drive.

Crysis: 170W
Vista desktop: 110-120W
Vista sleep (s3): 4,8W
Power off: 3,5W
Power off from the power supply: 1,3W