Our test system is fairly basic, featuring a Core 2 E7200, a 65W TDP mid-level dual core processor cooled by an Arctic Cooling Alpine 7 Pro connected to a variable DC fan controller so the fan's power draw does not come into play. The rest of the system consists of a single stick of Corsair memory, an Asus Blu-ray drive, a 5400RPM notebook hard drive and an OEM Seasonic 400W power supply. The operating system used is Vista Home Premium SP1 (32-bit).
Test Results: E7200 @ 2.53 GHz, EIST
....
Idle System Power 35W
CPU + GPU Load 65W
How did you get this power draw? I am running a very similar system:
Zotac GF9300-itx
Core 2 Duo E6300 45nm 65W TDP
OCZ Vertex 30Gb (.5W idle, 2W max)
2x2Gb Mushkin DDR2-800
The only difference in hardware is your Momentus 5400.6 HDD (.23W idle, 2.85W Max) and 4Gb ram instead of 1Gb. I also did not have a blu-ray drive or any optical drive at all.
On Bootup, BIOS access, or windows, I saw an idle of 65W. Measured from the wall with a Kill-a-watt.
Which leads me to my next problem. I am using the Antec ISK300 case, with the 65W power supply. The first few times I booted it, repeatedly, my system would power off - cold - after a length of time varying from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. This included one instance where I was in the BIOS making modifications. Also, I ran memtest twice, and both times, it shut down cold after about 1 minute. No errors, just power off.
Because I assumed I was exceeding the 65W max on the PSU, I switched to a known good 350W Antec power supply (torn from an Antec NSK1380 case). Boom, exact same problem.
Finally I found that if I plug in an optical drive and a windows install disk, it would not shut down. I installed Win 7 and it ran perfectly on the 350W PSU. However, benchmarking like Prime95 runs for 30 minutes (!) and then shuts off randomly.
Since everything ran smoothly I put the 65W original PSU back on and lo and behold, it still runs. Perfectly. I have not done any benchmarking or 100% load scenarios, but it has an uptime > 24hrs, and it has been used for HD video and >75% load scenarios.
So my question is, what is at fault here? Do I have faulty components? Is my power meter botched? What the heck??