That about wraps up our series on Cutting the Cord and Building Your Own Home Theater PC. I may be able to shave off a few more watts of power with a bit more tweaking, but for now I’m happy where we are. Once again, I want to mention that those numbers are the peak numbers, and most of the time I was watching the meter, the power usage was actually 10-20% less.Īll in all I’m happy with the power usage considering all that I have instantly at my fingertips through the Media Center or extenders. Normal tasks we would do on the Media Center ranged from a low of 51 watts for streaming AVI’s from my media server to a high of 75 watts for streaming MKV’s, also located on my media server. Throw in the fact that I won’t be able to access content on the Media Center from Media Extenders throughout the house when it was sleeping or hibernating and I’m going to have to stick with away mode. I’m sure if I enabled the sleep or hibernate modes I could cut that at least in half, but the USB IR receiver never seems to come back online when the machine wakes from sleep.
Once the boot settled down to idle I was seeing peak draw of only 42 watts and during our ‘away’ mode, when the machine hadn’t been used for a few hours, the power draw dropped a few more watts down to 38 watts. 48.1 watts is great considering my previous HTPC easily used over two to three times as much power.ĭiving into specific tasks we see the peak power usage of and any tests was 80 watts during the boot up process, which will not happen very often. I checked the Kill A Watt meter and it had used 7.93 Kwh (Kilowatt/hours) over 165 hours telling us the HTPC was using on average 48.1 watts during that time frame. The first thing we see is our average power use over an entire week.
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