[Discuss] cpu benchmarking and power usage

[adler at stephenadler.com (Stephen Adler)]

Guys,

Well... I don't know if I'm just in a time wasting mode or not, but I 
went off and got a Kill-a-watt meter, the P4460 model, and I plugged my 
UPS system which powers my desktop at home and then went all nuts trying 
to figure out how much it costs to run my desktop. As usual, I don't 
power it off and leave it running 24/7.

Then I went off looking for some CPU benchmarking tools so that I could 
run all cores at once thus giving me an idea of how much power the 
system uses etc.

So, I've got an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 v3 @ 3.40GHz based system. 
Total of 4 cores with hyper threading which gives me 8 CPUs when I do a 
'cat /proc/cpuinfo'. I then run this program called linpackc which is a 
program which measures the FLOP rate of the cpu, but its single threaded 
so I have to run 8 copies. The low down? The meter tells me my computer 
consumes 90 watts when idle, (monitors in power saving mode), 130 watts 
when I surf the net and check emails, and 220 watts when I run my 
benchmarking software in 8 different windows simultaneously. According 
to the meter, which I have been running for a few hours now, it costs me 
about 40 cents a day to power it.

So the first question is, is there a cpu benchmark or systems benchmark 
which will make the desktop go into overdrive and make all the cpus burn 
entropy, the disk drives I guess as well etc or anything else which 
would cause the system to chew up power... right, graphics library or 
something to push the GPU of my video card? All at the same time? I want 
to see what the peak power usage of my system can be.

The other side of the question is how much power do the desktops use of 
other mailing list members and if you know how much it costs per day to 
run your PC. Is 40 cents a lot? I don't know how it compares to others.

Cheers. Steve.