Measuring Power

Introduction

This post is all about making sure your folding rigs are as perfect as possible. The key measure of perfection is of course the points that it produces, storming your way up the charts is important! However, one must also consider the cost of achieving those points. For those us that are at university, or live with family and friends where electricity is free or included in rent, then you don’t need to think twice about it. But for the vast majority of the population, we need to factor in how much power a rig consumes to achieve the points.

So the new measure is now Points-Per-Watt (of electricity). However, we don’t usually care about points, we care about our Points Per Day (PPD), so the measure is PPD/W.

What’s a Watt?

A Watt (W) is one Joule of electrical energy per second. You will notice that power supplies having a power rating, so a 400W PSU can supply 400 Joules of energy every second. Now one joule/watt is actually a really small amount of energy, so small we don’t care. Or rather, utility companies don’t care. Utility companies measure/bill you in units of KwH. I.e Kilo-Watt Hours. Bear with me, I know this sounds a bit odd, but it will make sense eventually. One KwH is the power consumed by a 1 kilowatt device in one hour. There are 1000 Watt’s in a kilo-watt. So a device that uses 2000 Watts in an hour consumes 2KwH. Also, a device pulling just 500W for only 30 minutes consumes 0.25KwH.
So if we have a PC that is consuming 400W (we will talk about how we measure that later), that means it is consuming 400 Watts per hour, or in Utility terms, 0.4 KwH. So if we left that PC running for one hour, we would end up with a bill that equates to 0.4KwH worth of electricity.

Measuring the Watts

In my previous paragraph, I spoke about how much power the PC consumes (or “pulls” from the wall). We can measure this by using a device called a power meter. Here is an example of one:

Power meter

It behaves a bit like those extension block cubes that you can get, you plug the meter into the wall and then you plug your device into it. There is nothing stopping you plugging an extension bank into it (which is likely, your PC will have a monitor, the tower, maybe speakers and a printer). So the power meter will tell you the total power consumption of whatever you plug into it. So knowing how much it pulls, and knowing the performance (point production) you can work out the simple ratio, points per day, divided by the power consumption is your PPD/W.

For these calculations, I strongly recommend that you only have the tower plugged into this device, have everything else plugged into a different socket. Why? The power draw of a PC does vary quite a bit so you want to know how much ONLY the tower is consuming since if you have a dedicated folding machine, you won’t have the monitor on, so why bother measuring it! If you are interesting you can watch the power consumption vary when you turn on the FAH client, after about 15 minutes of 100% components will be running hot, so fans spin up (increasing your power consumption)

Why are we working this out? Well take a few examples, one person is using their top-notch NVidia graphics card to fold on, and it is giving them 25,000 PPD, but, graphics cards are power hungry and it consumes 450 Watts. Another person has an average PC with an average graphics card and between the two devices it produces 12,000 PPD but pulls 300W. Another person has bought a very expensive workstation PC, it comes with two Xeon processors and a bit of RAM only and pulls 350W but produces 120,000 PPD. Which PC is best? Well its quite obvious that the last one (the workstation) is clearly a beast. But between the first two, which is it? The graphics card produces more, but consumes much more power (which will cost more to run, more about that in a minute). So what we do is work out the PPD/W ratio for each of them.

	PC 1	PC 2	PC 3
Points Per Day	25,000	12,000	120,000
Power Consumption (W)	450	250	350
PPD/W	55.6	48	342.9

So what can we see? So the first two PC’s are actually very similar in terms of the points per Watt, PC 1 is marginally better so you would choose to run that. However, if you had a very limited budget but still wanted to contribute then PC 2 is still pretty good and its low power consumption means it won’t cost that much to run. PC 3 is obviously a beast, it is doing a daft amount of PPD and is pulling a modest amount of power. For the record, PC 3 is typical of those who have 2P Xeon workstations or 4P AMD workstations.

How much is it going to cost me?

So we’ve worked out how much power a PC pulls, and we can compare various PC’s as well, but ultimately, how much will it cost me to run. Well there is a very simple formula:
Cost (£) = power consumption * time * cost per unit

Just to run through that, the power consumption we know from our meter. Time, how long will the PC be running? Ideally 24x7! Cost per unit, now this is where you need to look at your energy tariff. It varies alot across the country (UK) and even around the world. But it can even vary by time of day – if you have an economy 7 tariff, you get a discount for energy use at night (based on the fact that you can’t shut down a power station!) in the later case, it can be a bit tricky. For me personally, its about 12.1p/KwH. But lets work through some simpler examples.

Example 1

I have a PC that I want to run FAH on, but I will only be running it for on average 2-3 hours a day (it’s my gaming PC, so the folding software runs when I go to play games and generally use the PC), how much will it cost me over a month? I’ve used a power meter, and my PC pulls an average of 275W when under full load.
OK, there are three things we need to know to work out cost:

1. Power Consumption = 275W
2. Time = 3 hrs. (per day) * 31 days (per month)
3. Cost Per Unit = 12.1p

So, we substitute in our known values:
Cost = 0.275 * 3 * 31 * 0.121
Cost = £3.09
So the PC on its own will cost just over £3 per month to run

Example 2

I have a dedicated folding PC, it will run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year. It pulls 350W, how much will it cost over the course of the year?
OK, same technique:

1. Power Consumption = 350W
2. Time = 24 hrs. (per day) * 365 days (per year)
3. Cost Per Unit = 12.1p

Cost = 0.35 * 24 * 365 * 0.121
Cost = £370.99

So the PC will cost me nearly £371 a year to run, that's about £35 a month to your bill. Now you can see why you want to use the hardware that gives the highest points, but for the least power consumption. Even though this second PC only consumes a bit more power (per hour), the fact its on 24 hours a day means that the cost rack up quickly which if you are not prepared for it, can be quite a shock, especially if you pay by the quarter as opposed to monthly like I do.
I hope that has been useful for you!
Ciao for now!

PC Mod: Minecraft Creeper Case Build Log #1

Background and Inspiration

I'm a lucky guy to have an amazing girlfriend, but one of the many things that makes her amazing is that she is a GAMER! How often do you find women into games eh? It’s awesome! One of the many games that she loves to play (and got me into) is Minecraft. The inspiration for this build came from one of the enemies (mobs) in the game called a Creeper:

Minecraft Creeper

Apparently the creeper came from a design of a cow that went wrong! So I want to build a PC for my lovely girlfriend that will be designed to look like a creeper.

Whilst the inspiration for the PC came from Minecraft, the actual “need” for a PC came about with my girlfriend. She has always been a modest gamer, but she uses a Mac. So I've had my heart set on getting her a PC for quite a while. I regularly read the project logs and see some amazing stuff being made, and I read the guides on Bit-Tech and they seem to make it look so easy to make decent looking work. So I thought I'd give it a go. So this is a confession that this is my first ever scratch built PC and mod, so I'm not expecting an amazing result compared to some of the regular modders on here, but hey, it will be a learning experience right?

Sponsorship

There are currently no sponsors at this stage, however this space has been reserved should any come forward.

The Plan ^TM

For now I'm coming up with some initial designs and sketches of how I want the PC to look. An afternoon of sketching whilst watching Toy Story 3 with my little brother has resulted in the following conceptual drawing:

Conceptual Drawing

As you can (or can't) see in the picture above, the idea is that the main body will be fairly square in cross-section and be reasonably tall. In order to make the “legs” of the creeper that you can see in the first picture, my idea is to use water-cooling radiators, one of the front and one on the back. That will give it the “bulk”.

There will be a “window” on the front that will allow you to see inside, the water-cooling piping will be either green, or filled with green coolant to make it look like the guts of the creeper.
There will be two “drives”, one Solid-State “boot drive” and a high capacity storage drive to hold the steam and origin (she likes the Sims too!) libraries.

The eye's of the creeper will have the Power and HDD activity lights (one per eye) and they will be red LED's. I was thinking red because red looks evil and horrible, and after all the creepers are wicked little buggers. Or maybe they should be green? I'm not sure yet. I'm thinking that the widest part of the mouth should be the “optical drive”. Not the type where the tray comes out, I'm thinking the kind where you slot the disc in and the drive “eats the disc”. For a bit of future proofing, I think this should be a Blu-Ray, but at the very least it needs to be a DVD drive. I think that the bottom of the mouth (either side) should be the on/off and reset switches (black to blend in as much as possible).

From the picture below, we can see that the internal anatomy of a creeper contains a significant amount of TNT:

Creeper Anatomy

I'm not sure how I'm going to make something look like TNT.  I've got an OCZ 500W PSU. It's non-modular. But I'm tempted to try and convert it to a modular PSU using the modding guide on Bit-Tech to try and keep the wiring down to a minimum (I do also think I will need to make custom cables for this, primarily due to length to help with the cable routing).

I'm thinking that if I disassemble the PSU, and give the case a good sanding down to get down to bare metal then I could repaint it red and maybe spray paint on the TNT lettering.

Right, that’s me done with conceptions and creativity for now, I’ll try and publish more information as the project progresses (very slowly!)

Keeping organised: electronic components

Background

As you all know, I received an Arduino Starter Kit for Christmas, I gave a quick un-boxing guide here. 

The Electronic Components box in the kit contains, quite shockingly, all your electronic components, such as resistors, potentiometers, switches, LEDs. You do get quite a good selection, a very good selection if I'm completely honest! And they all come in this nice neat anti-static bag. 

Herein is the issue.

All these components with tiny and some not-so tiny legs all in one bag, and you are after one in particular ... What can possibly go wrong?

Well I'm an organisation / planning freak so I like everything neat and organised and to know where they are. If you are in a professional workshop and producing hundreds of boards, you probably have your bench with lots of these :

The one above is quite a small one, you can get these with over 100 drawers in. And they are the perfect width for having the tapes that resistors come on in without breaking them out. Ideal!

However for those of us whom are just starting in electronics these are both a) big and bulky b) more than you need c) can be very expensive!

So something else is needed ...

The Solution!

I was having a wander around B&Q in the post-Christmas sales, I was after some mirror mounting pieces, but whilst comparing the prices to both Homebase down the road and Amazon, I found (thinking back I really should have known this .... ah young, first-home-owner, lessons learned) that B&Q was a rip off!

So whilst walking to the door I just happened to spot piles of Really Useful Boxes. Now I've used these for nearly 10 years. I first encountered them when I was getting ready for university. My mum bought me a load (being a teenager I never noticed prices, especially when others were paying - it was her choice she suggested them!) and as such they were used to move me in, out and up and down the country for years. Having bought my first home in April 2013, it is only today I noticed that one of them (of about 15 I own!) has a crack in the corner - no where near bad enough to warrant it being binned, still massively useful, in fact its role hasn't even changed because of the crack!

So after all these years they have stood up to a lot of abuse and I can definitely vouch for them, yes they are expensive, but these will out last the contents! Anyway I digress

So I spotted the big ones and told the other half about them, she winced when she saw the prices! But then I spotted a palette of the tiny little ones that you use on your desk. There's no way I would buy them because really how useful would they be? To me, I doubt I'd use them, but then I saw a multipack like this :

All for £7. Thinking "pah, rip-off B&Q, let's see what my dear friend Google has to say" ... a few swishes on the smart phone later I was pleasantly shocked to see that Google says that B&Q was the cheapest! So I bought said pack!

Coming home I wanted to get on with organising all my components in my organisation freaky way.... I have to admit, I was slightly elated when I got home to do this, so on the sofa I went and poured out the components from the anti-static bag and started sorted into each tub. Each tub contained its own type of component. For instance one held switches, but also the potentiometers and the tilt switch. Another held all the LEDs, another had all the resistors (in an ideal world I'd like a box for each value of resistor!)

In the end, this is my newly organised array of boxed components :

So everything in its place, but where is it's place? Well to take things one step further I dug out the Sharpie marker pen and started labelling up the boxes fortunately, only one of the "fronts" of each box has the embossed Really Useful Box logo, so flipping them around I could start to label up each box with its contents as you can see below.

The very top row, which I've not marked up contains the jumper wires provided in the set, each box contains it's own size of wire from smallest to largest.

I hope that has been interesting. Let me know what you think and how you keep your bits, (electronics! wait that doesn't necessarily remove the innuendo ... ) organised.

Ciao for now!

Bespoke Computer Fabrication

I’ve always had an interest in computers, but my interest didn’t turn into a true hobby and a passion until I had left university, which is when I came across the Custom PC (CPC) magazine. CPC are due much criticism, not only did they get me truly interested in a hobby, which like all hobbies is a never-ending fiscal drain, but a hobby that goes obsolete as fast as you can bat an eye lid such as computers, but also folding at home. The final flavour of the computing hobby that they have gotten me into is modding.

What is modding? 

Well modding is the activity of modifying your PC. This can range from simply adding some UV lights and fans, right up to a bespoke design, fabrication and paint job! The Custom PC and Bit Tech website has hundreds of articles on modding and an extremely active modding community. Reading all the articles and seeing the, quite frankly pieces of art (!), that is being produced has made me want to get into it too. Especially with the articles, they make it look so easy to get into and to produce fine pieces of kit. So if it’s so easy, I'm going to have a crack at it and earn some e-fame! What could possibly go wrong? …

So I've got some ideas on some mod’s I want to do. And I plan to do a complete build log so that I can publicise my work. I'm new to this, so I'm not expecting a work of art, but it will be an experience. In the coming weeks and months, possibly even years (I'm not a full-time Modder – I wish!) you will get to see me pulling together some designs. So for now, you’ll just have to wait and see!

Ciao for now!
Chris