Several years ago I bought a couple of Smart power strips.
They have one socket into which, for example, a computer could be plugged. When it was powered down, slave items such as a monitor and sound system plugged into the slave sockets would automatically be turned off too.
They worked well but now need replacing.
In searching I am b..d if I can find anything quite matching them.
Anybody know better.
TIA Alan
'Master/slave socket strip', but I can only find Euro ones:
Ah, an Overclockers thread pointed me towards this:
Theo
Do you mean one of these?
I have however found that, since modern computers draw less current than their older counterparts, the current isn't always enough to trigger the switch or, if it's marginal, you might find that all your peripherals get turned off when the the computer is idle.
On one of our computers, I've had to connect both the computer box *and* one of the monitors to the main socket of the smart switch to make it work reliably. I have to turn that monitor on and off manually!
I have my computer and monitor plugged into a Kasa energy monitoring socket (and remote-control switch, although I don't use it for that).
I was quite surprised to see how little power they use when they are asleep. When I put my PC to sleep ("sleep", not "hibernate" *) and the monitor goes into energy saving because there's not signal from the PC, the combined power consumption falls from about 90-100 W down to about
2.5 W. (My PC takes f-ing ages to be usable after a total shutdown/boot-up so I do this as rarely as possible, and normally just put it to sleep overnight or other times when I won't be using it for a while.)So you may find that it's not worth the extra hassle of making sure the smart power strip removes power to the monitor, given that its energy-saving power is likely to be very low.
(*) The PC does draw continue a very small amount of power, so I presume it's preserving the system state by keeping the memory powered, rather than by saving it to disk and then totally turning off the PC power. Am I right that "sleep" keeps the memory powered and "hibernate" saves to disk?
In a nutshell yes...
There a s number of sleep states - S0 (normal operation) to S4 (hibernation). Under hibernation the system context is written to a hibernation file on the disk. When the system is "woken" very similar to a cold boot pretty much of everything is off except RAM, and the system context needs to be reloaded from disk.
Other states will keep context in RAM which is preserved.
Some of the gory details here:
Easy enough to build your own...
The principle:
Some of this will start as a baseline:
Here are numbers for my Zen3 5600G (65W processor) Power numbers are idle, while in Windows 11 desktop.
CPU idle 12VDC @ 0.32A or about 4 watts (DC clamp-on ammeter around yellow wires)
These numbers are wall measurements with a Kill-O-Watt meter. PSU is non-PFC Enermax EG465-VE (not one of those 80+ ones). The watts to VA ratio, shows the PF is not 1.0 but is the bad older number.
W VA S0 46 78 (While CPU draws 4W or so, one hard drive, GTX1050 video card is idle) S1 44 76 (Screen goes black, monitor sleeps, measured power is only the computer power)
S3 5.3 14.5 (Sleep: 4x16 DDR4 DIMMs remain powered, CPU off) S4 1.8 9.3 (Hibernate: DIMMs and CPU off, no wake on lan) S5 1.8 9.3 (Soft Off, PSU still making +5VSB so machine can button-start)
The VA is easier for a smart power strip to measure, and it will be measuring the amperes and pretending the volts are a manifest constant.
Smart power strips with the sensitivity adjustment knob, you may be able to adjust them, but the adjustment range is not infinite. You can adjust a small amount around the advertised number. They are unlikely to tell you what the adjustment range is.
******* Example of full-blast numbers (Prime95 blend)CPU All-Core 12VDC @ 6.1A or about 73 watts (on a 65W CPU w. some turbo)
W VA S0 139 210 (While CPU draws 73W or so, one hard drive, GTX1050 video card is idle)
The memory has a significant difference between idle cycles and read/write cycles. The implied number by this measurement, still seems like a lot of memory power. There should not be any chipset power increase. And that's the thing, when you do measurements like this. Lots of surprises.
*******Around the year 2000, both idle and full on a PC were 150W, and you could hardly tell Prime95 was running (that power was not measured with a Kill-O-Watt by the way). Memory bandwidth back then was a mere 300MB/sec. The CPU ran on a 35W single phase VCore power converter. Nobody gave a rats ass about wasted power back then. The motherboard, cards and drives, were absolute villains.
My monitor back then, a Trinitron, saved no power at all when the screen went blank. I always loved that part. What did save power, was 1024x768 drew less power than 1280x1024, and that was a significant amount of electricity. You could feel the top of the monitor running cooler. LCDs do not behave the same way.
Paul
What on earth is there to go wrong with these? As far as I know they merely watch the current at that socket and turn the other sockets on when current is taken. Brian
You know one of the now defunct office supply stores used to do a power sensing strip with an adjustable threshold. It cost a bit more and of course, no guarantee that it can go low enough for what you want. Brian
Fucking hell.... if you wrote that at work you'd be off to see the equality and diversity police in double time where they would give you a final written warning.
yes you are right..... you have to use appropriate language such as Primary and secondary..
cannot even write enabled or disabled anymore,
its now activated or deactivated.
Can't write blacklist or whitelist either, its Allowed list vs Disallowed list.
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