Aniseed wrote:
Sure, its possible to look up what one's CPU consumes, but there are
several hardware and software components drawing power, and it quickly
becomes difficult to know how much is really being consumed.

I'm particularly interested in the consumption of a lighlty equipped
PentiumPro machine which is on all the time, no monitor. It is
passively cooled, and the heatsink feels quite cool to the touch, so i
am hoping it is below the 50W mark.

I happen to know this one!

I for about a year, I ran 3 Pentium Pro 166 (overclocked to 240Mhz)
motherboards, 3 hard disk drives, 3 ethernet cards on one 145W power supply.

I measured each motherboards DC usage as around 40W, with the CPU going
flat out. (mp3 encoding)

None of them ever crashed in about 3 years total run-time (adding up all
the motherboard times)