Quote from: jimbobway on September 01, 2010, 03:11:17 AM

Quote from: Ground Loop on September 01, 2010, 01:11:37 AM

The article is all about the cost of the hardware, neglecting the more significant cost: electricity.

Once you're above baseline power of 11 kWh/day (as any geek is), Southern California utilities get about $0.13/kwh marginal, with taxes, distribution, etc.
The 24-core beast built in the article probably draws some serious current. Hard to guess how much, but I'd guess about 500W? Anyone know?

The 24-core beast will draw a minimum of 380W (using the power supply calculator: http://educations.newegg.com/tool/psucalc/index.html)

What you have calculated is the power requirements of system with a single Phenom II X4 processor, the article talks about 6 such processors in one system.

A single Phenom II X4 consumes at full load approximately 125W (see TDP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Phenom), 6 such cores would consume about 750W, so a full system including memory, video, motherboard, will draw about 900W, assuming a 1000W power supply unit (a somewhat pricey device which is oddly forgotten in the article) with an efficiency of around 80% you can expect drawing over 1 kW 24/7 running such a system. Assuming 1kW and you pay 0.15ct for each kWh that would be about 3.60 every day on power consumption. That's a little bit more than the value of generating one block (which gives you 50 bitcoins).

As you're expected to generate one block each day, you would actually lose money generating bitcoins, even when you got that $2000 system for free. Of course this is assuming you pay a more or less standard price for electricity, don't have any excess self-generated electricity, you don't recycle waste heat, ...