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."

Comments

Lame

[vlm]

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)