Mac Pro power usage
The Mac Pro is reasonably power efficient, though its power usage at idle seems rather wasteful. I used my Watts’s Up @AMAZON
| Mac Pro 3GHz Power Consumption 10GB memory, ATI Radeon X1900 GT, 4 X 500 GB Maxtor 7H500F0 hard drive |
 |
|---|---|
| Activity | Watts |
| Sleep | 6.5 |
| Idle | 290 |
| Fully loaded (400% CPU usage, 9.2GB continual memory access, no disk activity) |
375 |
The ATI Radeon X1900 GT video card contributes significantly to the power usage; it has its own dedicated fan and hot air vent out the rear of the chassis. The internal hard drives draw only about 8 watts while idle, so the figures won’t change much with only one internal hard drive.
Add another 90 watts or so for the Apple 30" Cinema Display, and about 30 watts for an external boot drive.
Disabling one or more CPU cores using the developer “Processor” control panel did not alter the power usage at all.
