We were the first to give the full scoop on power consumption in today’s consoles, so we broke out the trusty old watt meter to find out how much power is being sucked by the PS3 while folding. I had feared the worst, as the Cell processors must be working at their full potential doing these calculations.
I am happy to report that the PS3 consumes no more than about 200W while folding, with a Power Factor of 0.99. This is the same peak we saw from it during gameplay. Considering that the PS3 accounts for about 65% of Folding@Home’s current TFLOPS, yet only 13% of the total active processors, this should be considered yet another bragging point for the PS3 as a folding unit.
To give an idea of how much this might cost, my Watts-Up Pro estimates that the PS3 will consume about 138 KiloWatt Hours per month at this rate. The price of electricity varies widely around the world, but here in Hong Kong, I pay about $0.12 USD per KWh (after my normal power usage is accounted for). So to keep the PS3 folding 24/7, I will be paying about $16.56 extra on my power bill each month. If I still lived in Vancouver, where they have an abundant amount of hydroelectric power, the cost per KWh is a paltry $0.053 USD. This would mean an extra $7.30 every month to have the PS3 folding 24/7. A small price to pay considering how efficient the PS3 is at folding; at this rate, we may just get some good results from this project after all!
Now, can we have some good games please?
[...] it provides on how much computational power PS3’s have added to the Folding At Home project. PS3 power usage during Folding@Home » HCW Tech Blog it would be great if we could get a bunch of PS3 owners here folding for team #12864 (Tech-Forums) [...]
Can anyone give me a better reason than “helping the better cause” to wasting your CPU cycles, ultimately lowering the amount of years your PS3 will last? Unless you’re so dirty that you have a few of them laying around…
[...] It is nice to see that they have turned off the fan for downloading (and presumably they will also be off while navigating the Dashboard) which makes the system a little more tolerable noise-wise. It’s also a good thing the 360 will turn itself off after downloading, because even at idle, it draws almost 160W – just about as much as the PS3 while it is Folding. [...]
[...] Carl Nelson details, the PS3 running 24×7 crunching WU for Folding@Home is eating about 138KWh of power. [...]
I’ve been running folding pretty much 24×7 since it came out and I’m watching my electric bills creep up. I’m paying an extra 18 bucks a month for this to run. 216 bucks a year for protein folding? I think there might be more effective ways to donate.
What is Folding@home? Or what does it mean??
Well, you can save money on heating in the winter :)
It seems folding @ home was best meant for machines that will be on anyway, and which are just idling.
At least in my experience, that doesn’t fit the PS3. Most people turning it off after playing it.
200 watts equates to 11 lbs a day of CO2 into the atmosphere. If you’re leaving your PS3 on just to fold, there’s a high environmental cost too.
And how much would you spend just having it on?
In the case of my computer, it will remain on, folding or not. I don’t think I will find such a difference in my electricity consuption.