Does sending an email cause a computer to use more energy?

[Bullgrit]

Say I'm using my computer to read ENWorld. I decide to send an email. Does sending the email cause an increase in the power (electricity, nuclear, steam, whatever) usage for the computer? I assume that if there is an increase in power usage, it's probably miniscule. But is there actually an increase in power use?

What are some things that can cause a non-miniscule increase in power usage while using a computer? (I'm not talking about adding hardware to the computer, I'm meaning some "spike" in usage from just using it as it is.)

Bullgrit

 

[tomBitonti]

Sending an email should not use a lot of power. But, there could be extra stuff happening, say, windows mail deciding to pack you messages as a part of the send, or doing a lot of rendering of images that are included in the message which you happened to display, or, if there are large attachments, a virus scanner could be running expensive scans on the attachments.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Bullgrit]

But, there could be extra stuff happening, say, windows mail deciding to pack you messages as a part of the send, or doing a lot of rendering of images that are included in the message which you happened to display, or, if there are large attachments, a virus scanner could be running expensive scans on the attachments.

Does the computer actually pull extra electricity to perform those tasks?

Bullgrit

 

[Janx]

Does the computer actually pull extra electricity to perform those tasks?

Bullgrit

In the old days, almost no. The CPU got 5 volts of power regardless of what it was doing. It went through the same number of cycles per second.

Though increased processing did generate more heat (more electricity consumed) and increased heat causes the thermal sensors to trigger the fans to increase speed.

Add to that concept today, that processors include voltage/speed regulators so at idle usage, it gets less juice and less speed. Once utilization cranks up, it gets more power.

A lot of this technology was delivered in blade servers, as a means of reducing operating expense in states like California where electricity costs were high.

Gradually, this tech gets implemented in more consumer grade stuff like laptops (which is valuable for improving battery life).

Now does sending an email consume more electricty? Only a marginal amount compared to just having outlook open.

And in the scope of how much juice your PC is using compared to your AC system? It's all trivial. Turning off your PC for a day isn't going to give a huge difference in your light bill.

 

[tomBitonti]

My understanding is that hard disk drives have increased power usage during spin-up, but continue at a lower and continuous rate afterwards. Some appliances (for example, a laptop) may have a mode which reduces power utilization at a cost of decreased performance.

Video card power power consumption can vary dramatically. For example:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/279391-28-power-requirements-specs-popular-graphic-cards-guide#.

GeForce GTX 480 (Fermi) 1536MB 384-bit GDDR5

Core Clock: 700mhz
Shader Clock: 1401mhz
Cuda Cores: 480
Effective Memory Clock: 3696mhz
Power Consumption at Idle: 54 watts
Power Consumption at Full Load: 320 watts plus

I don't think RAM or video displays vary in their consumption (although, a display can require a lot of power, I don't think that varies during active use).

I'm not finding much about how CPU power utilization varies -- although I'm sure there must be some data out there, since CPU power management is a growing concern. For example (note: these are disputed figures):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation

Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition Agena (65 nm) 2.6 GHz 140 W or 125 W 53.85 (140 W), 48.08 (125 W)

I've never heard of network cards using a lot of power. Here are some interesting charts:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~acr31/pubs/sohan-10gbpower.pdf

NIC - Active Power (W) - Throughput (Gbps) - CPU Usage (%)
Intel(Base-T) - 21.4 - 11.0 - 369.6
Solarflare(Base-T) - 18.2 - 15.8 - 508.3
Broadcom(Fibre) - 14.0 - 18.7 - 264.7
Solarflare(Fibre) - 5.9 - 15.9 - 508.3
Intel(CX4) - 5.6 - 10.3 - 302.3
Solarflare(CX4) - 4.9 - 16.5 - 484.4

That is at such a high end and the power utilization is so low that power consumption for a consumer device would seem to be a very small portion of the overall utilization.

Anyways, I don't imagine that sending an email should have hardly any impact on power consumption. If you noticed a spike while doing some work, I'd look for something else as the cause.

Thx!

TomB

 

[airwalkrr]

I really doubt sending an email uses up extra power at all. It probably uses up slightly more CPU cycles to send if you use a client like Outlook instead of a browser, but the number of processes would be miniscule in comparison to everything else your computer is already doing.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I think the simplest answer is yes. Any task your computer performs draws power, whether miniscule and insignificant like calculating a differential equation by sending electrons through a processor, redrawing the display on your screen (and sending electrons to your monitor that tell it what to draw while it draws its own power to actual make the pixels glow), or more substantial like spinning up the hard drive to search for a PDF. None of that, however, is typically a drain worth noting.

The biggest power draws should be the cooling fans for the power supply itself, the processor, and graphics cards. Next is probably power to the speakers, although powering the hard drive and disc drive motors might be bigger than that. Furthest down the list would be the various processing tasks themselves. The big power hog there (relatively speaking) is typically graphics processing (hence moving more of that process onto the graphics card itself and off the motherboard and giving it separate cooling). Sending email I should hope would be insignificant enough to be ANY kind of consideration as it requires no intensive calculations or processing whatsoever. Increases in power draw would be tasks that either involve applying power to hardware or that are exceptionally processor intensive - model this thermonuclear explosion, break this code, or redraw my Call of Duty game on the screen faster.

 

[Umbran]

Say I'm using my computer to read ENWorld. I decide to send an email. Does sending the email cause an increase in the power (electricity, nuclear, steam, whatever) usage for the computer?

Well, as others have effectively suggested, that's a bit context dependent. Whenever you ask, "is there an increase in X?" what you really need to ask is, "Is there an increase in X at this time, as compared to some other time?" Define that other time for comparison, and the question can be more clearly answered.

If you, the user, are doing some web-browsing, watching a few cat videos, and then switch to email a link to a video to a friend, no, you're not going to see a notable increase in power use.

If you, the user, are off cooking dinner, and need to tell your S.O. to pick up an ingredient on the way home, so you wake your computer up form sleep mode, then surely, your machine will be using more power when sending the e-mail than when it is idle.

 

[Random Bystander]

If you wish to reduce energy usage, buy a high-efficiency stove, fridge, furnace and air conditioner. Then, replace all of your incandescent bulbs with LEDs. To reduce power cost, depending on location and subsidies, consider having solar panels installed. All of these together are likely to reduce your energy use and budget substantially. However, depending on the cost of electricity in your location and various other factors, it may not be financially viable.

If you simple want to know how much more electricity is used to send an e-mail, the only solution is to record your computers' use of electricity for a sustained period of time, and mark off the times during which you sent an e-mail. Statistical analysis should then allow you to determine the probable average use of electricity.

It is dubious that any useful gain will come of this, unless you are considering a server farm peak usage.