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Digging Into the Electrical Cost of PC Gaming
New submitter MBAFK writes "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. If you assume a 20 hour a week habit, and using $0.11 a KWH, actually playing costs Geoff $30.83 a year. If Geoff turns his PC off when he is not using it, he could save $66 a year."
If that is all you are spending, then it is money well spent. There are more expensive alternatives.
I'm not sure how this has anything to do with the cost of PC gaming, considering that my mother, who only uses her computer for Facebook and TurboTax, could see the exact same benefits by doing the exact same things the article suggests.
I bought a kill-a-watt meter a while back when I started dabbling in Bitcoin mining and it was a real eye-opener.
It's a very similar problem to OP's situation since Bitcoin mining and gaming both use high performance video cards.
As a ballpark, for most regions I find calculating the yearly cost of an item on 24/7 to be about $1/watt.
13 watt cfl on 24/7, $13/year($4.33 for 8 hrs/day, etc), my Emachines e725 laptop, 24/watts so $24/year(less when screen is off,but it is 'on' 24/7). etc.
Great tip when buying large TV's etc you can quickly figure if that plasma is worth buying or not(for me, not).
And of course everyone should buy a $15-25 Kill-A-Watt or equiv. to see what appliances might be leaking etc(We found a fridge so wasteful a new one was paid for with the power savings in 3-4 years).
What about switching out power hungry gaming cards for newer, more efficient cards? This year's mid-end model may have comparable performance to last year's mid-high end model but might draw half the power. Over time, the lower power consumption adds up, not to mention you can get by with a smaller power supply. Likewise, trading in your hard drives for a solid state drive (maybe using a green HDD for extra storage)? And for old timers, switching out CRTs for LCDs? Overall, I think it'd be easier for people to upgrade to more energy efficient components than it would be for them to change their PC usage habits. Lowering the sleep/HDD shutoff/monitor shutoff timers can make a big difference too without having to remember to shut down your PC every day or waiting for it to reboot. Not an option for everyone, but gamers usually aren't on a shoe-string budget or else they wouldn't be able to afford the PC and the games in the first place.
>If you assume a 20 hour a week habit, and using $0.11 a KWH, actually playing costs Geoff $30.83 a year.
>If Geoff turns his PC off when he is not using it, he could save $66 a year."
A $66 saving on a $30 bill? Sign me up!
Wow, earth shattering news here, turning off your PC when your not using it saves you a significant amount of money! What about factoring in cooling costs. High end gaming machines put out a lot of heat too. Since many gamers are using SSD's these days, sleeping your computer is great, they resume so fast. It's just common sense. I make sure everyone in my house shuts down or sleeps their machines at night if there is not a valid reason why they are on. It really does help. The real problem with this list is where is the spec list? That dual or triple GPU machine, that is water cool, and has a huge overclock will use a ton more power then your i5, single GPU machine. Finding an average gaming machine is tough to do.
Everyone always has a right to complain, but some people's complaints are silly and make me think they're idiots, or to put it nicely, their personality is generously infused with irony.
I can't say whether or not you're an idiot, though, because you merely said "too high" rather than explaining why you think your rates are "too high" -- you might have good reasons which expose corruption in your state's PRC, or you might have amazingly stupid and arrogant reasons, based on arbitrarily saying things without thinking hard about them, and where even those shallow thoughts are founded completely on a lack of information and evidence.
So who knows? You didn't even give numbers for "too high" (which wouldn't tell the whole story either, but would probably bias me one way or the other).
Now do a calculation of how much of your employer's time you wasted doing your calculation!
If you make all the bad assumptions the RIAA makes, I bet you can make it hit a cool million, easy!
True costs - where is the vitamin d deficiency, light sensitivity, prices for bawls and redbull, price for pizza, radon exposure from your mom's basement,depends for long raid nights, divorce costs, hardware costs and software licensing and general lowering of testosterone levels. Of course the benefits are, water savings because of less baths, no social costs (coffee shops, movies, dates, video rentals, vacations, etc), not expensive presents for friends, less electricity used in the house because no other lights are used, furniture reduction, lower vehicle maintenance costs, lower automotive fuel costs, and more leet gear
I would suspect C3 sleep states are supported on a majority of systems by now. Perhaps I was just lucky when I picked up the hackintosh board a few years ago. Now, I simply use a reasonably long idle timer and the system goes to sleep/power off. It takes a few seconds to come back out of that state and wholly beats a cold start.
I guestimate my home system gets about 3-4 hours of usage each day during the weekday. In addition, there are plenty of other device around the house which support other core services.
I don't know if it's so much about being green as it is the sensibility to turn a light switch off if it's not in use.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Lame as heck.
Does he game in a pitch black room? My basement (my basement, not my moms basement) used to be lit by 800 watts of incandescent lights on tracks (which isn't all that bright for 30 x 30 feet), and as they burned out (which took awhile) I replaced then with $50 LEDs that will pay for themselves in saved ecological and energy costs in a mere five million years of operation. Anyway the point is my lighting electrical budget in the basement was an order of magnitude greater than my video card power budget and the capital costs are darn near as bad. Depreciation schedule is much longer however.
Another issue is my property tax is very roughly $2 per square foot of my house, and my desk (which is admittedly pretty luxuriously large) is about 20 sq ft and my elaborate "executive reclining office chair" is probably at least 4 sq ft extra, lets call that 25 sq ft * $2/sq so you're looking at $50/yr rent to the city (aka prop tax) simply to store the machinery, which is about twice the supposed electrical consumption. Now if you want to see high annual average specific power consumption per sq foot, try the 4 sq feet where my clothes dryer resides... Or my furnace, or air conditioner compressor...
Another way to look at it, is I splurged and dumped $200 of environmental and energy degradation into purchasing my last video card a couple years back. The electrical cost will approach the capital cost of the card, assuming the video card is the only consumer of energy (LOL) at $30/yr, in 2017. Of course the card will be functionally obsolete before 2017.
So if you can afford a gaming rig and can afford to upgrade it every five years or so, you can simply ignore the costs of operating it as a rounding error. Or the operational costs only matter if you stole the gear or got it as a gift.
Kind of like, if you can afford to buy a $60K SUV or pickup truck, then $4/gallon gasoline is merely a rounding error to be ignored. Or if you buy a $2M california mcmansion, a $1K month air conditioning bill is a rounding error compared to the mortgage (to say nothing of the decline in property values)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Considering that the gas portion of my energy bill utterly dwarfs the electricity portion (especially during the winter), I hardly even pay attention to how much electricity I use. For those who have electric heat, I am sorry.
Since they're so important when it comes to incandescent bulb discussions, they must be important here. How much will he lose by paying for extra heat that his PC isn't providing?
Millions, even billions of joules??
I think the clear solution is obvious.
60 watt incandescent bulbs EVERYWHERE! SAVE THE WORK OF GOD-KING EDISON!
Electrical costs are why I put an SSD in my home theater PC. Fast boot time means a PC that was on 24/7, is now only powered when in use.
All in all, that is really peanuts in terms of electicity bills. If you are spending roughly 2 hours a day gaming, a normal person with a full-time job and a family would have very little time to do much else that can sink money.
Considering that yearly electricty bills routinely reach about a $1000+ for a standard household, this added 10% due to gaming is pretty insignificant when compared to other hobbies...like racing cars for example.
Sure, there may be cheaper hobbies, but I honestly don't think anyone well-settled enough to be practising a daily hobby and deriving enjoyment from it finds it a problem to spend 8 bucks 50 cents a month for their recreation.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
If only my phone service was that cheap.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
That's nothing. Not even worth my time trying to save. When I can save $67 a month, post.
I'm not sure what exactly the article is trying to convey here, as measuring electrical consumption is merely fine-tuning an existing expense related to a hobby, and an obscenely small amount of money being measured at that (c'mon, ~$30/year? People who will spend twice that much in a month on caffeine just to play said hobby).
Compare playing video games to spending money on cable TV. Or going to the movies. Or riding a bike outside. Discussing literally pennies of electrical savings per day seems rather pointless when you're spending considerably more to sustain that kind of hobby in the first place.
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As of my last month's bill I am paying 28.8 cents per kWh. I'm not sure how much power my computer uses, but with my Nvidia GTX280 and an overclocked 4 Ghz dual core CPU I would assume at least 400 watts. Particularly while playing a game. So let's say 12 hours for a day of gaming. So 4.8 kWh or $1.38 per day of marathon gaming. If you assume 4 days per week that would be $22.12 per month or $265.42. Of course my computer may actually use 500 or 600 watts while gaming. What interests me more is how much power my computer uses when I'm not gaming. There have been times when I've just left my computer on all the time. I would suspend to RAM, but I usually run Windows and I have yet to find a version of Windows that will properly wake up from an STR properly. That's why I'm thinking of switching to Linux. Suspend to RAM works perfectly for me in Linux.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
At the most, a high-end gaming laptop uses 250-watt, since their ac adaptors state that. Compare that to a PC that uses 450+ watts.
You could also save more money if you only play consoles AND don't play online. you'd be using less energy than a PC and won't need a fast internet to get low latency.
What is the cost of your time? I leave my computer on most times in order to avoid the startup "process" my aging system has or to maintain program state between uses. Conversely, I shut off the system to force myself to not use it.
Anyway. Spread the cost of time across the year while waiting to boot. This could easily be higher than $66 for those of us making a reasonable wage. As an object exercise, 30 seconds per day for 365 days is about 3 hours. If you make $22/hr then the savings is a wash. Just a simple example.
this is only the immediate direct cost. the true total cost is higher. this is because there is an environmental cost that is not accounted for in the generation of electricity. we don't live in a static universe, so if we don't take the hidden costs into account the full repercussions of our choices will not be apparent.
also, assessing the cost simply in monetary terms has a feedback effect that keeps us unconscious of the actual impacts of our decisions. we stay focused on things like saving more money, or making more money, etc. what i'd love to see is a holistic analysis in terms of money and something like (say you were using hydro-power) the number of salmon that the dam prevented from spawning each year for a year of gaming. which would provide a less abstracted context for decision making.
as someone who cares about the state of the world, imho, maintaining a holistic perspective on *everything* is a requirement for being a good steward (a responsibility we are all born with whether we take it up or not). whenever i fail to looks at things holistic i have failed as a steward. this is because we are all (humans, rocks, air, animals, etc.) interdependent.
Keep the inside of your computer clean. Clogged filters and fans consume more power to keep the computer cool.
You're working on one of the smallest possible incremental changes in your house's electrical usage. What's the point?
The wall warts (AC adapters) scattered about your house almost certainly use and waste more electricity than your PC. The US EPA guesstimated in 2005 that around 200 gigawatts (6% of US total power) goes through these things, and a significant portion of that (30 - 50%) is wasted.
See http://www.buildinggreen.com/auth/article.cfm/2005/3/1/Efficiency-Standards-for-AC-Adapters/ Getting all your wall warts onto centrally controlled power strips would seem like an interesting and money-saving challenge. If anyone has done that, I'd love to hear about it.
Turning off your computer saves electricity!
I mean seriously, wtf.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Someone just moved out of his parents house and realized that electricity actually costs money. Spoiler alert, 40 minute long hot showers also costs a lot on the water and gas bills.
Its hilarious me when teens / early twenty-somethings leave the protected isolation of their parent's nest or university dorm and suddenly get a good ol' does of reality.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
If he weren't interested in gaming he could likely make do with a much less powerful GPU and/or possibly a more power-efficient CPU. The combination of those two would reduce his power consumption even further during non-gaming-related computer usage (or idling).
As of my last month's bill I am paying 28.8 cents per kWh. I'm not sure how much power my computer uses
So maybe instead of blabbing crap about you do something about it?
1. get a kill-a-watt meter - it's $20 in ebay
2. plug it in and see
Guessing how much power you use is stupid without actual measurement.
Secondly, this is not the "cheapest rates". These are typical rates in the US. Where I live, I pay 6.5c/kWh, which is one of the cheapest rates.
1W power usage => 8.76kWh/year utilization.
So for me, each W reduction, it saves me about $0.60. 100W = $60.
For you, 1 W reduction in usage (eg. standby) yields $2.52. So maybe your usage of suspend to RAM is not a good thing - it costs you $10-$20/yr.
I've got a desktop which runs in the 30's for wattage while doing low CPU consuming tasks like browsing, and never reaches 70 even at full load, and gets down to the high 20's when completely idle.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
To really figure the electrical cost of gaming, you have to figure out what else people would be doing if they weren't playing games. Some activities, like watching TV, would use as much or more power.
My guess is if we calculated the energy use of those other activities, gaming might be a net energy saving activity.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Seriously, you live in a very odd situation. While I'm not against conservation, and indeed I do turn my PC off when I'm not home because why use what isn't needed, you can't try and use your situation to apply to the population at large. 100 watts is NOT something I have to think about. My house has about 15,000 watts of power available to it at all times. 100 watts more or less is not noticeable and is well within the margin of error I get depending on how the AC is run.
... too much expensive.
I used to use a old notebook for day-to-day computing. A Celeron M450, to be exact.
But the damn thing died, and I endup ressurrecting my Athlon XP 3.0G with an ATI HD 3850 to do the job.
(ok, I'm hearing a lot of laughs, but this machine was, a long time ago, a power computer! =P)
The crude fact is that my electric bill raised 25%. (sigh). In one year, this accumulated difference will be more than the market price of this computer.
Things could be worse, however. My "Media Center" is a Atom 330 (good to see DVD graded videos, terrible to B/W), and this machine is also my torrent server. I could not had made a better choice. This machine runs 24/7 (almost), and the impact on my electric bill is negligible (less then 5%, comparing with the previous month on its incept date).
I'll probably use this solution forever. A Atom graded computer for everyday use, and a power setup for the games (but, honestly, I'm on PS3 the last months - don't think I will go back to PC gaming so soon).
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
News flash: turning shit off that you aren't using saves energy.
Honestly, why is this news?
I can pretty much find a bunch of equivalent expenditures and compensate in one manner or another.
If you want to see real money then figure the hours spent gaming instead being used towards a second income. That might make you wince.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What I find amazing and bothers me to no end is that turning the computer off is no longer considered a normal thing but the exception. "If Geoff turns his PC off"? How about *because* Geoff turns his PC off, he saves some money and the environment? Waste, the child of abundance...
There are 120 MJ/gallon in gasoline. Assuming a 25% efficient motor (most ICEs are around that efficiency, although they certainly are often higher), you should be able to extract 30 MJ/gallon. 30,000,000/3,600,000 = 8.3 kW/h per gallon of gas. 1 gallon of gas is about $4, meaning you can generate electricity with one of the most expensive fuels available at a terrible efficiency for 48 cents per kW/h.
Natural gas, per gge, is about 1/2 the price of gasoline, sometimes less. That means that at 28.8 cents per kW/h, you should just stop buying energy from the grid and generate it yourself. You could generate it using natural gas for about 24 cents per kW/h!
And *that* is why they use the "cheapest" rates, because your rates are so incredibly high, it's comical, since you could use your own personal generator and save money.
Why bother turning a PC off if all you're saving is less than an hours pay?
Cry me a river so I can put up a hydroelectric dam and profit from your whining.
wow, it seems very insightful. Thanks for investing your valuable time to reach the irrelevant conclusion of USD $66 per year. Would you not compute the costs of all countries in the world? I might even change countries of others make gaming electricity costs cheaper...
If you are playing PC games the lights all over the house may be turned off. If you were not playing PC games then you might be moving around the house with the lights on. Likewise in winter your heating from the game is just heating your house. Even better it's heating the room you are in, so you can let the house be more cool. If you were not gaming perhaps you would be driving your car somewhere, like your girl friends house, and using gasoline. It could be that gaming saves you money over alternative activities in terms of electricity.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Haha you loser! Play roughly 5 hours a day = 35 hours a week and I pay less than 40$ a month in total(everything included). What sick computer do you use, some wreck from the 80'ies ???
How about the fact that by turning the device on and off again, it expands and contracts the solder binding all of those important internals to the MOBO. This, in turn, ruins the life of the device. I would rather worry about spending money on a new device more often than the usual as opposed to the extra $66 a year.
The big cost of gaming is the time used for the sport that could have been used for much more productive activities. For example, I teach engineering, and have had a number of PC gamers as students who have ruined their careers by playing games instead of doing the learning someone paid to give them the opportunity to do.
if you can afford to be a PC gamer you can afford the power bill. it is true that newer more high performance things are more efficient. but you don't own a gaming rig to be earth friendly. just like those rich CEOs of power companies don't own a Ferrari for the same reason. me personally.. I hate winter. so if global warming is real.. the world is becoming more awesome.. now if I had a way to generate my own power for little or no cost I would. not to be green but to eliminate my extra taxes
USD0.11/kWh is too cheap. Get used to paying 3-4 times that.
that may be, but not many of us have 486s any more ;)