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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."
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.
Meanwhile the Geoff and his coworker discuss these types atrocities at their daily meeting at Starbucks while sipping on their third expresso.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
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.
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
If they were using Free Trade Watts, it wouldn't be an issue.
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
He's comparing apples and oranges.
Let X be the cost of normal, non-gaming usage
X + $30.83 = cost of gaming 20 hours a week in addition to (or in place of?) normal usage
X - $66.66 = cost of non-gaming usage if you shut down the PC when not using it
But what is his time worth? If I value myself at the same rate my employer values me, then the startup time of my computer costs about 15 cents. I use the PC in the morning before work and in the evening after work and throughout the day on weekends, so that's 30 cents a weekday plus 15 cents for each weekend day or $1.80/wk. 52 weeks in a year, so it costs about $93 of my time waiting for it to boot up. If you have downtime in which you'd be doing nothing otherwise, then it may be worth it. If your schedule is usually tight, then it's cheaper to leave it on all the time.
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.
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.
As a ballpark, for most regions I find calculating the yearly cost of an item on 24/7 to be about $1/watt.
Rephrased, at 8.76 cents per kilowatt hour, one watt year costs about a buck per year. Plus or minus leap years and leap seconds. After endless add on taxes, and fees, and fees disguised as taxes, and taxes disguised as fees, that's probably about what I'm paying when I write a check.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I have a meter as well; one thing to consider with replacement appliances is the reliability and longevity of the appliance.
I have a 33 year old Sub Zero built-in refrigerator in my new house. It's so old that it has only one knob for temperature adjustment, and the refrigerator compartment on top is slave to the freezer setting. I've removed the cover to the compressor and coils to clean them, and I've found some indication that a service or two have been performed over the years, but compared to a friend's brand new LG unit that's had to be serviced twice in eight months and had cost them $1600 to purchase, I'm happy to use this fridge for the moment. Plus, a new built-in refrigerator will cost between $4000 and $8000 depending on what brand and features are chosen. This unit can run for a very, very long time for $4000 worth of electricity.
As for TVs, one doesn't necessarily have to use the fancy, big TV all of the time either. For many years I had a projector screen that could roll down in front of the entertainment center, blocking the 27" TV in it, so I could use my projector when I wanted to watch something of substance. Now, I have the projector in a different room from the TV we watch the news on, and we only use it when we actually want to watch a movie or some other thing where surround sound and a big image matter. Obviously the roll-down method won't work with a fixed TV, but putting the fancy home theatre TV into a different room would.
My current PC (an old Dual-Xeon box) has a hardware sleep switch that ties into some pins on the motherboard, and when pressed the computer drops down to a low power state. When I'm done using it I just put it to sleep, and when I want to use it again it comes back in about three seconds. Works well, keeps all of my programs running fine, and saves power.
There are lots of techniques that can be used to save power, but the biggest hogs in the house (HVAC, hot water heater, refrigerator, oven/range/cooktop) don't hold a candle to the consumer devices that everyone always panics about. If you want the most bang for your buck, insulate your house. Change your windows. Plant some trees that increase shade on the structure. Turn your thermostat up a couple of degrees and install some high efficiency ceiling fans to keep the air moving a little. Sure, turn off the electronics you're not using, but don't assume that it'll be earth-shattering on your power bills just by doing that.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
My home has on average 100 watts of power available. I can use more in the short term, but doing so depletes the battery and means I'll have to use much less for some part of the week. The wind turbine which is my sole source of power is rated at 750 watts, but only generates that much in absolutely perfect conditions. So I know quite a bit about how to use power economically. I can light my whole house effectively with just 18 watts of LEDs. They're strategically placed, yes - but you can easily read more or less everywhere.
In this situation, the graphics card on my computer (Radeon HD 6850 at 127 watts TDP) is actually the biggest power drain I've got. Obviously, my gaming is limited to two or three hours a day... Power is worth thinking about.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
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.
Plus or minus leap years and leap seconds.
Probably less than the cost of the energy needed to calculate it.
I suspect you mean Market Economy Watts. The term market economy, which is being used in Economic "science"(term used very liberally here) is so far removed from reality, does not apply.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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.
If you can't wait for it to boot you can sleep it. The difference between sleep and off is minimal on a modern machine.
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.
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.
I was going to post but an AC beat me to it- with SSD I am much more likely to shut off my machine because it boots so quickly.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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).
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
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.
That "paltry $100 a year in savings" would buy me nearly a year's supply of toilet paper. Good stuff, not the cheap garbage. The rest of your post is just stupidity personified for the sake of looking superior or clever, I can't tell which, nor do I care, since you fail at both, dumbass.
Expresso is a common variant spelling of the word espresso; many people consider the latter spelling "correct." Note however that both words are loan words, espresso being Italian, and expresso being Spanish, so some argue that either variant spelling is acceptable.
Another place to save amazing amounts of power is lighting that tends to be left on.
I replaced some select lights with LEDs and save ~$108/mo
breakdown:
2 60 watt bulbs replaced with 13W LED
3 13W CFL replaced w/ 8W LED
6 40W incandescent replaced w/ 2.5W LED
several old florescents w/ magnetic ballast replaced w/ 21W LED strips
These are lights that tend to be left on courtesy of life with kids. I spent ~$1K on LEDs, it'll be paid off in under a year.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
I may switch to LED bulbs at some point, but right now they are incompatible with the dual-brite fixtures outside (they'd basically never dim) and with the failures I've seen in supposedly-lifetime CFLs I'm waiting until there's some installed userbase history to know what to buy and what to avoid. They're SO expensive relative to incandescents that I can't justify the cost to purchase them until I know they'll last long enough to recoup the investment. Having been bitten by CFLs once, I'm not going to get bitten by LEDs.
As to your lights being left on, you might want to consider a motion sensor switch in rooms where it would work, as they'll just shut themselves off. There are two kinds- one which replaces the normal Decora light switch, and another that mounts to the ceiling or wall like how a security motion sensor does, and is another switch in-line. The latter kind is commonly found in public schools now, as people tend to leave lights on a lot there as well.
I installed timers on two of my bathroom fans- I can turn the fan on for five, ten, fifteen, or thirty minutes, and it automatically shuts off. Makes it a lot easier when the bathroom needs more ventilation after the occupant leaves. The switches were pricey (as they're Ivory, not Almond or White, so I had to pay the color tax) but work perfectly.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I've been installing only two brands of LED:
Phillips and Sylvania, both have long guarantees (based on a date stamp on the base) IIRC it's 5 and 7 years.
So far I have had one failure on a bulb that was installed over a year ago and when I went to submit an RMA I got a response back in one day confirming shipment of the replacement (a newer model too:) without me needing to do anything. (they take the serial # on the bulb).
I asked if they wanted it back to the e-mail and they said the first gen bulbs were not needed back for an RMA (I think this means they knew there was an issue, but with how painless they made it I won't bitch).
All in all I have ~ 15 LEDs installed and aside from that one failure I've really been pleased.
I buy when they are on sale only. The sale prices can be over 50% off still as a new model comes out and they liquidate the old units.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
that may be, but not many of us have 486s any more ;)