It sounds like something is wrong with how your hardware or OS is doing power management if you don't see a difference between idle and full load. Also, what else is in your system? 50 ways seems pretty high. For just the CPU, the most power-hungry Atom I can find has a TDP of 10 watts.

http://ark.intel.com/m/products/59683/Intel-Atom-Processor-D...

I was somewhat being facetious. The difference of idle and load on the Atom is just a handful of watts. Completely nil when compared to my (older) desktop which is about 120 at idle and if you do some number crunching on GPU and CPU, the draw is about 230.

Agreed. Something isn't right here. An Atom system should be drawing much less power at idle.

I have an older low end AMD system I built with the intention of having it be low power. It draws around 40W at idle.

The dual core atom from the 2010 era is a strange beast. True it idles at less than 4 watts, but the chipset they were paired with draw 15 watts or so.

My estimates for my power usage are:

  Chipset/motherboard: 15 watts
  CPU: 6 watts
  2 hard drives: 10 watts
  really old crap PSU from 2002: 20 watts

Although I didn't measure each component by it self, all the power requirements and specs are posted online mostly. Except my really old PSU, I can only assume that is where the power is going. I probably should have bought a new PSU for the build, instead I bought $20 in adapters just to make the PSU work with the board :) But my killawatt meter clearly shows the box drawing 50-55 watts around the clock.

And if you are nosy, this is what the dual core atom box runs: http://shorewall.net/XenMyWay.html

I got tired of having a separate web dev box and firewall box in my house. So I stood up Xen on a debian OS on the atom hardware, and now my firewall and web dev box are Xen guest. Make for fun Dom0 host upgrades when the internet is being provided by a guest that it is itself hosting...

Depends upon the generation of Atom honestly. Older Atoms had extremely inefficient chipsets paired with them despite the processors having some varying power draw, but the CPU on those only took somewhere between some mW up to several watts which were eclipsed by the rest of the system typically (the chipsets drew at least 11 w idle or load last I remember).

I had one of the older Ion 2 Atom 330 boxes that were popular for media center PCs and it didn't really matter if it was made by nVidia either - power draw was pretty much the same no matter what.

Similar to what sister posts say; I have a reasonably large home fileserver (one of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP3K293... with dual xeon 5606's and 12 non-green 7500 RPM disks) and don't find it makes me surprised in terms of consumption.

Power bill for the apartment typically runs me ~80-100$ a month, (I'm mildly embarrassed that this is the metric I gauge my server by as opposed to true avg. wattage) not insane, higher than I might like though. I'll likely shrink to whatever the latest gen of that neat Intel mini-itx server board they recently released is, when the big build starts to go, but I'm not sure how much that will end up helping.

Your $/kWh is important though, $80 in your area could be $200-300 in others

Is your dual core atom the first generation atom, that shipped with a 945 chipset? IIRC, the cpu was about 10w, but the chipset was 25w :(

Yep: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121...

If you're trying interested in the power usage (and not just trying to make a point or comparison), I just recently built a very similar box (same motherboard and CPU, different RAM, and 4 TB instead of 6 TB HDDs + a pair of SSDs for the OS and ZFS ZIL and L2ARC). I can plug it into my Kill A Watt and measure the power consumption if you'd like.

Yeah that would be cool. I tend to leave my NAS in sleep mode, since I don't keep daily use stuff on it.

Probably not 100% accurate, but the APC UPS on my nas build of similar design (xeon e3, 8x3tb red main array + 3tb scratch/hot spare + 2tb scratch + 500gb ssd for jails)

reports 30w when idle, 42w when reading from the array, 75w when transcoding in plex

My energy bills aren't crazy, and I leave it on 24/7

Ten drives in idle alone is 30W (WD Reds are 2.7 each).

I must assume I'm wrong in this calculation but 40 watts seems pretty cheap in cost. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+watts+in+kwh+per+mon... at a 3.3 cents per kWh rate is just under a $1 per month right? On the top tier of my local utility it would still be under $4 per month. http://www.austinenergy.com/wps/portal/ae/rates/residential-...

1 W draws about 9 kW-hr/year, so for residential pricing of about 10 c/kW-hr, you get about 1 $/W-yr.

I think most Americans pay between $0.20 and $0.40 per kWh.

I am lucky though that here it is only $0.06. But in summer months it goes to $0.14 for every kWh over 600. Staying under 1000 kwh's a month is hard to do.

Speaking of summer, if you're trying to cool the house with an air conditioner, you can multiply the effective wattage of the computer by 3.

True, that is a good point.

The average price of electricity in the US is $0.13. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf... And you would have to be somewhere really remote to pay $0.40.

$.106 and free weekends.

In California, PG&E has tiered pricing such that even a moderate user in the bay area will probably be paying a marginal rate of ~$0.35/kWh.

In the U.S. $0.20 per kWhr is a more common rate.

Those prices are an Alaska/Hawaii and New England thing. Everywhere else its pretty cheap.

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/

I have a TS-140 with four disks in it running FreeNAS. I'll hook it up to a killawatt tomorrow and let you know what it draws.

Yes, please do so! Is it the one with the Xeon? Also what/how much ram...