Susuto

Almost no desktop PC’s reduce the clock of the CPU when idle. That is a technology that has stayed in only the highest performance laptops, and they only do it when on battery power. You can prove me wrong with links to 5 PC chipsets that do this. But they don’t exist.

I’m not sure what you’re talking about with the drives *not* spinning. CD Drives almost never spin, and hard drives only consume 8 watts each while in use. If a PC is being used so little it can spin down it’s hard drives, it might as well have just gone to stand-by.

Processors at idle, vs processors at maximum consumption show very little increase in power consumption. Now there are a few Xeon’s that were designed for use in server rooms that see peak times and then long hours of idle that do use as much as 60% less power during idle. But the mainstream desktop processor is still designed in such a way that if it’s energized, it will use 80-90% of the power it uses when it’s under full load. With that said, a processor is usually only 1/3rd of the power consumed by a PC, meaning the difference of total power consumption is negligible.

And yes, I own a Watt’s-Up Pro that logs any device power consumption to an excel spreadsheet. I have 17 computers that I run folding on, and none show significant reduction in power consumption at idle, except of course, my laptop on battery power.

I will say that my PC’s that are running the GPU client do drop once the GPU client is turned off, but again, that is because they are engaging hardware on the video card that wouldn’t otherwise be in use.

A far more significant reduction in power consumption can be made by simply having your monitor set to shut itself off after 5 min of inactivity. Apart from that, shut your PC off when you’re not using it, but the extra tenth of a kilowatt (1 cent) used by folding over an 8 hour work day (for example) is still worth it in my book to contribute towards the cure of cancer, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s, etc.