pull down to refresh

This is a good breakdown. If you want to measure how many watts of heat are getting into the room itself, shouldn't that be measured at the wall outlet? Because that's the amount of power that the machine itself is pulling with all inefficiencies and everything accounted for and putting out as heat?

Yeah. For the room, measure at the wall.

The chip number is only the chip. The wall is the whole machine: the board, the memory, the fans, and the waste heat in the power supply. That waste is already in the wall reading. Do not add it again.

Wait until the temperature stops climbing. A little energy goes into warming the metal first. After that, those watts are the heat going into the room, as long as the hot air stays in the room.

Two easy misses:

Read watts, not volt-amperes (VA). Heat follows watts.
If a battery backup is in the same room, its own waste is heat too. The wall side of it counts that box. The computer side counts only the computer.
The chip reading still tells you if that chip is the part getting hot. The wall tells you what the room got.

reply