Motherboard Probably uses 50 to 150 watts, and each stick of memory requires about 15 watts. The processor needs between 80 and 140 watts of power.
I’m writing an article on measuring how much power certain devices or gadgets consume. I’d like to know if you can help me measure the number of watts that a motherboard consumes when it is in perfect conditions (with no overclocking, with low-end processors, etc.) and not doing anything really.
Introduction
The main purpose of a computer (or any other electrical device) is very simple – to convert another form of energy into a useable, in this case, electric, one. However the process is not quite so simple, and even involves components that are almost redundant when you think about it.
This is probably the single most important question to ask when you’re shopping for a computer. It’s not enough just to look at overall system wattage or ‘power usage’ anymore, as those figures don’t tell the whole story. With more and more devices having switched from AC to DC (including).
So what is the point of this article?
Well, I guess that it provides full explanation for questions like ‘why does my motherboard only use 40W’? The answer to that question is usually either that the CPU isn’t being used at all or is using a very low-level process, in which case the board uses more power (the graphics card and hard drive require extra power). But nevertheless, as an example, we will take the current average system composed of: Intel Core2 Duo E4600 2.40GHz CPU; 1GB DDR2 800MHz RAM; 160GB 7200RPM HDD; 5x DVD burner; on-board
For example, let’s take an incandescent light bulb; it uses electricity because if you run an electric current through certain materials they become ‘hot and give off light. So running that current through a piece of silicon gives off heat (which has no real use) and light while being converted into electricity with an efficiency of less than 50%. A motherboard then seems almost pointless as all it does is change the voltage from 3V orV to 5V and use up some electricity – why not just have a circuit that stays at 3V?