I was writing up a response in another thread and thought this might deserve a thread of it's own.
There aren't a lot of power consumption details on older PowerPC hardware, I think this is mostly because the architecture demanded a lot of energy to perform. Apple love to boast about their 6W/hour mac mini, but we didn't see any marketing material about how much POWER the G4s and G5s consumed.
So, here are my own non-scientific and slightly rounded-out results. I have plugged everything into a digital watt/voltage/amperage meter at the wall and noted the steady idle consumption and the variances under load (running GeekBench 2.x).
My Power Usage Results:
It would be interesting to see results from the 970fx model G5s (including the iMacs) as well as the Quad and more G4s, like the Quicksilver, MDDs and lampshade iMacs.
Feel free to discuss and/or post your results!
There aren't a lot of power consumption details on older PowerPC hardware, I think this is mostly because the architecture demanded a lot of energy to perform. Apple love to boast about their 6W/hour mac mini, but we didn't see any marketing material about how much POWER the G4s and G5s consumed.
So, here are my own non-scientific and slightly rounded-out results. I have plugged everything into a digital watt/voltage/amperage meter at the wall and noted the steady idle consumption and the variances under load (running GeekBench 2.x).
My Power Usage Results:
- G4 Sawtooth 350Mhz with Radeon 9700 GPU (no display)
- Idle: 55w. 95w under load.
- G4 Mac mini 1.42Ghz (no display)
- Idle: 30w. 60w under load.
- G5 Dual 1.8 (2003) 970 with FX 5200 GPU + ADC 17" Display
- Idle: 170w. 275w under load.
- G5 Dual 2.0 (2003) 970 with 6800 GT GPU (no display)
- Idle: 170w. 400w under load.
- G5 Dual 2.3 (Late ‘05) 970MP with Quadro FX 4500 GPU (no display)
- Idle: 150w. 250w under load.
- Non-PPC for comparison: Mac Pro 8 Core 3.2Ghz (2008) Xeon with GTX 680 GPU (no display)
- Idle: 220w. 270w under load.
- The G5s were tested at idle consumption with the CPU speed set to Reduced in Energy Saver, then set to Highest Performance and run through Geekbench for load testing.
- Note that the 6800 GT, FX 4500 (and GTX 680) GPUs are all power hungry. Stock-standard graphics cards such as the FX 5200 or ATI Radeon 9600 consume much less power.
- Some of these units have more internal devices (expansion cards, hard drives, optical drives, etc) than others, so this is just to get a rough idea of how the different machines consume in the real world.
- It's interesting that the Dual 2.0 maxed out so much higher than the dual 1.8 when they share the same period architecture, (logic board and PSU) and have interchangeable CPUs.
- For reference, the Mac Pro's original GT120 graphics card would draw approx 60 watts less while idle than the GTX 680.
It would be interesting to see results from the 970fx model G5s (including the iMacs) as well as the Quad and more G4s, like the Quicksilver, MDDs and lampshade iMacs.
Feel free to discuss and/or post your results!
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