On Thu, 18 Feb 2016 07:38:04 -0800 (PST), wrote:




Anyway I have been using those inexpensive mobo/cpu combos and they work
well and take very little power. My wife's machine has 32 gigs of RAM
and she can easily run several "heavy" apps at once with no bogging down.

Also it is surprising but a PC will draw more power when it is thinking hard.

Hook up a current meter or kill o watt etc to the PC then watch it. Grab the top of a window and slide it around the screen and watch the current.

Mark

Playing with my kill a watt shows that playing a streaming video
(Netflix or whatever) is about the most CPU intensive thing I do.
I don't play interactive games tho.