TLDR – turn off your games PC and you could buy another game each year.
Working for a software company that saves people money off their power bill it is hard not to think about how I can save some dollars at home using what we learn.
My coworker Geoff and I have been taking power meters home to see what the true cost of PC gaming is. Not just the outlay for hardware and software but what the day-to-day costs really are. This series of posts will help PC gamers do our bit for the environment and save some cash at the same time.
Before you can figure out how to save some money you first have to know how much you are spending. Both Geoff and I play every day and both have decent enough PCs. Using power meters borrowed from work we measured some baseline power numbers for our current games of choice.
| Machine | Power State | Watts | KWH | Dollars Per Hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| geoffstacks | Off | 2.50 | 0.0025 | $0.0002 |
| geoffstacks | Sleeping | 4.00 | 0.0040 | $0.0004 |
| geoffstacks | Idle | 108.00 | 0.1080 | $0.0119 |
| geoffstacks | In game D3 | 269.51 | 0.2695 | $0.0296 |
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| mbafk | Off | 2.92 | 0.0029 | $0.0003 |
| mbafk | Sleeping | 5.50 | 0.0055 | $0.0006 |
| mbafk | Idle | 100.14 | 0.1001 | $0.0110 |
| mbafk | In game DOW2 | 157.70 | 0.1577 | $0.0173 |
If you assume a 20 hour a week habit and using $0.11 a KWH. Actually playing costs Geoff $30.83 a year and me $18.04. Not too shabby if you think about it in dollars per hour.
As I am sure you have guessed the point here is what happens when we are not playing games. Talking to people I know, we gamers seems to fit into two camps: 1) Turn off the monitor but leave the PC on. 2) Turn off the monitor and shutdown or sleep the PC.
If Geoff leaves his machine idle (but does turn off his monitor) when he does not play it costs him $66.66 a year more than if he turned off the system.
If I did the same, in one year it would cost me $45.05 extra.
I don’t know much about Diablo 3 but $45 will buy you a whole lot of pointless DLC skins for Dawn of War 2. But seriously folks, turn off your PC when you aren’t using it. The environment will thank you and so will your wallet.
If you’re interested in what your own power consumption looks like over time, you should sign up for a free Granola Enterprise account.
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Mat
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Well your article isn’t very specific imo. Is the monitors power consumption included in the idle consumption, if not … what’s wrong with your rigs? 100W idle is a lot …
Christoffer: When idle (staring at the screen) the monitor is 42.97 watts and the system is 54.97 watts for the mbafk PC.
This is something I started thinking about a while back. I liked the idea of being disconnected and wanted to at least run my office on solar power. Toward that end, when my last gaming PC finally was retired (A mid range core 2 duo with a NVidia 9800), I replaced it with a good laptop, an ASUS U31SD with a NVidia 520. Both ran/are running Linux Mint, with my most intense gaming coming via wine.
I know neither of these top end gaming PCs, but my gaming habits are pretty dated too. I never looked at power usage on the desktop, but using the built in monitor, my new laptop draw only about 8 watts in idle, and about 35 while playing Halo via wine or Quake 4 (native Linux client), Half-Life 2 (via wine). These are perhaps the most intense games I have in terms of pushing the hardware.
The Optimus technology makes a big difference. I also love how the Linux power display gives you such detailed values for power and battery. Running somewhat less demanding programs such as a PS1 emulator or a Quake 3 level shooter runs beautifully on the Intel chip using only about 13-15 watts.
While tracing a power leak, I measured my rig as well.
Just the PC is 72.1 Watt when idle. So I can very well imagine that a somewhat beefier PC could be 100 Watt.
My monitor is 0 Watt when idle (blanked)! (or at least, it is less than 0.1 Watt, the measurement threshold of the power meter). Groovy!
When displaying something, my monitor is 40 Watt.
My new PC is 4.1 Watt when off, but I’ve got an old one lying around which I almost never use, which does 9.1 Watt when off! Needless to say, I unplugged it. That’s some energy easily saved.
Cool, I’ve been helping the environment all these years I’ve been powering off and didn’t even know it, nice to know. Also cool to see you play DoW2, maybe I’ll see you in there sometime. I’d ask your handle but I don’t think you would want it public.
You haven’t accounted for the heat produced by all your computing equipment. Every KWH you consume becomes heat that has to be removed by your AC system. That costs money too.
Randy: When I was a poor grad student living in England the computer heating the room would have been a nice problem to have :)
Leaving machines on is also an invitation to malware and if you’re already infected, to allow it to spread.
My PC draws ~90W when idle, but it’s a Core i7-3960X with a GTX 580, 16GB of RAM, and four HDDs. It’s both my gaming and work PC.
Then again, with power at ~12c / kWh, there scarcely seems to be a reason to shut down. I don’t power off at all during the winter — that heat is useful. During the summer, I’d be much more likely to shut down in order to help “pay” for the copious amounts of AC power that I draw during the June – August time period.
Just my .02, you understand. It’s interesting to see the numbers, and my own usage varies considerably. Thankfully NV and Intel are both very good about keeping idle power low, or I’d probably feel obligated to swap to lower-power GPUs when not gaming (which happens when I’m not playing anything in particular).
The convenience is worth the very minor cost of $45/year. I’m worth it.
Turning off your PC causes unneeded wear and tear and is a stupid idea. Leave it on. Go out to eat one less time a year and you pay for it
Worthless article and teaches PC owners bad habits
Huson: Can you point me to a credible source that proves that leaving the machine on reduces the wear and tear on the system? I am interested to see the numbers.
Its the principle of thermal stress. Compare the components in a pc (the silica pathways) to the filament in a lightbulb. Continuous heating and cooling cycles (on and off) weaken the metal until one day it blows when you turn it on (electrical resistance being low when cold). This is most commonly seen in power supplies and motherboard voltage regulators.
Oh for the love of Pete.
The whole “Turning off your PC is BAD!” schtick was true in the earliest days of computing, when everything ran on vacuum tubes. Tube-based computers were far more likely to fail at power-on or power-off than while operating. This hasn’t been true for *decades.*
There’s nothing to debate here. People who care more about saving power, reducing heat, or consider the saved cash ‘worth it’ will turn them off. People who don’t, won’t. Seeing the actual numbers is interesting because it provides useful data on how much you save.
Using a black or darker background will saves power , retrofitting antiquated power supplies, if you run a lan the heat offset could be worth auditing
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