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Electricity price rises

Started by GodAtum, Fri, 27 May 2022 10:57

GodAtum

With my electric tariff going up by 70% I think i need to make drastic changes to my 747 simulator. I have 5 Intel NUCs running PSX and a PC (with a 3090) running MSFS 2020.

I've worked out it's actually cheaper running AWS EC2 spot instances then running all the NUCs during a flight. So I was thinking replacing the NUCs with Pi 4 connected to the monitors and USB hardware. Then using a form of remote desktop to pass that through to the cloud.

I suspect that could be a bit laggy though?

Hardy Heinlin

Do you have a plug-in power meter? Something like this?

https://reductionrevolution.com.au/products/plug-in-power-meter

You could check if it makes any significant difference when you run your PSX instances at 48 fps instead of 72 fps -- except for the one PSX instance which is the boost server for your scenery generator. But if your scenery computer runs at a frame rate below 50 fps, you could set the PSX boost instance to 48 as well.

If you're lucky it might reduce the power by up to 20%.

If it's just about EFIS/EICAS screens, 48 fps is absolutely OK. The real 744 screens are updated at 50 Hz only.



Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers

The amount of extra points of failure and nuisance that you will introduce is significant. Consider that, too.

Hoppie

GodAtum

Thanks Hardy, yes I have a few of those. I've set the FPS to 48/2 and I'll see how that goes.

That was my worry as well Jeroen. I like to keep it as simple as possible.

Martin Baker

Have you worked out how many kWh your setup uses?

I've got 2 PCs, 2 Mac minis, 7 monitors and various peripherals - they use a total of 0.44 kWh combined, which is less than I thought. At my current rate it costs me 13p per hour to run the sim.

M

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GodAtum

Quote from: Martin Baker on Sun, 29 May 2022 13:21
Have you worked out how many kWh your setup uses?

I've got 2 PCs, 2 Mac minis, 7 monitors and various peripherals - they use a total of 0.44 kWh combined, which is less than I thought. At my current rate it costs me 13p per hour to run the sim.

M

According to my meter, the total for the whole sim is around 10 units/day. No idea what that means. My energy bill is 28.00 pence per kWh.

United744

I look at it like this: what else could I spend my money on that gives me as much as joy per hour as my sim for that cost?

Answer: absolutely nothing.

I can't even go out to fly for real without it costing me £20 in fuel just getting to the airfield. How much electricity does £20 buy me? at 25 pence per kWh, it buys me 80 kWh. My computer uses about 500 Wh, so that is 160 hours of virtual flight time. For £80/mo. that buys me 640 hours of flight time, but I'm sure not achieving that.

The problem with the whole argument about "cost of electricity" is that the propagandists have gone on so much about the cost, people have lost track of what energy they actually use. Most people use only what they require, and rarely ever more. The price keeps increasing, but I know for a fact I use about the same amount of power today as I did 10 years ago!

The question to ask is: if I don't spend money on energy, then what exactly am I doing with life? There is not a single thing we as humans can do that doesn't involve energy. The morons that want to control us know this, which is why they keep targeting energy systems. They want us living in caves.

At the end, all you can do is measure your POWER CONSUMPTION, and calculate at what price it really becomes truly unaffordable for you. That benchmark is when you have no money to cover the bill.

Compare the cost of flight simming to any other hobby, and you'll find that even the up-front hardware costs are modest, and the running costs are miniscule. My brother-in-law sails, and his boats are upwards of £5000 each! Then he needs to pay an annual membership fee and finally cost of fuel to get anywhere to sail them. Flight sim is positively cheap.

It sounds all nice to run an AWS server for all this remote processing, but it is in no way a substitute for local processing power. The internet is horrendously unreliable, and AWS is subject to processing delay that is transparent to the server instance, but measurable in real-time outside of the system. In fact, they can halt processing for several seconds, and your system inside will not know about it, but you sure as heck will sat at your house! It really isn't an option.

Hardy Heinlin

Quote from: Martin Baker on Sun, 29 May 2022 13:21
I've got 2 PCs, 2 Mac minis, 7 monitors and various peripherals - they use a total of 0.44 kWh combined, which is less than I thought. At my current rate it costs me 13p per hour to run the sim.

I just checked my iMac running 1 PSX instance. Setting the frame rate from 48 to 73 fps adds circa 10 watt.


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