Sometimes, manufacturers use lower-quality components to cut their operational costs. As the paste degrades, your PC may run hotter, leading to throttling and forced cooling, demanding more energy. Your gaming PC may break a sweat running some software, including your favorite games. For example, your computer may require up to watts per hour when running Rocket League. Dust is a significant threat to your PC. Once it accumulates on the heat sink, it causes your computer to overheat.
In turn, the overheating forces your PC to run slower to avoid damage while the cooling fan starts to run harder and longer, drawing even more energy. To clean dust from your PC and prevent it from increasing your electricity bills, follow these steps:. Armed with this information, you can consult an expert or an online calculator. To use this method, plug the meter in a wall outlet and then your computer into the meter.
This will enable you to determine how much electricity your PC consumes when running games, idle , or both. If you need a power meter, we recommend that you try the Fayleeko Meter from Amazon. It comes with a large backlit screen for easy reading in dark corners and awkward angles. Its lights turn off after a minute to save power. Simply put, thermal design power means the amount of heat generated by a device, which a cooling system must remove for the device to operate as designed.
Notably, you can use it to identify the best cooling system your gaming PC needs. According to a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the typical gaming computer consumes as much power each year as approximately three refrigerators. This evaluation is just one of the alarming discoveries in the impact of high-performance gaming computers on household energy consumption. Whether we expected it or not, the rising costs of energy bills are here.
Join us as we take a closer look at the extra energy costs associated with gaming PCs, so you can take steps to reduce your carbon footprint.
A recent study printed in Energy Efficiency estimates that at least one billion people around the world engage in some form of digital gaming. Furthermore, PC gaming brands and manufacturers exaggerate the significant potential for energy savings.
Some companies claim that central processing units, graphics processing units, power supply units, motherboards, and memory RAM have the potential to trim energy by as much as 1. Think of this as redistributing the cost of purchase; it's not always that simple, but we'd generally rather have increased efficiency ratings and power protections than more watts.
It all depends on the build, of course, and that's what we're dissecting here. Let's first talk power supply basics: How PSUs rails are divided, voltage ripple , how many watts are required, and power efficiency, then we'll dive into individual component power consumption benchmarks. In a bout of irony, the PSU is, in fact, overkill for all of the hardware tested here. Disclosure: The test PSU was supplied by Enermax , who sponsored our time-intensive research process and content.
First, a couple of sample PSUs. This is what we typically see when looking at PSU specifications on a retail website, like Amazon or Newegg. There's a lot more to it than that. Silence, thermals, modularity, form factor SFF not featured above, but important , efficiency, wattage, endurance, cap and electrical design quality, and warranty are a few more items to take into consideration. For sake of simplicity, the above list provides a look at a wide range of PSUs we think would be commonly found in gaming desktops.
The goal is really just to throw some specs in front of everyone — priming for the content. Those listed, let's move into other pre-benchmark topics. The greater topic of PSU selection — that is, regarding topics beyond wattage — is out-of-scope for this content, but it's worth going over a few basics. This should hopefully get the conversation of PSU selection started, hopefully spinning-off a few research ideas for PSU shoppers.
Each component in the system, no matter how small, requires some amount of power. The main power connections in a system operate on rails of three voltages — 3. Some PSUs run multiple 12v rails, something we talk about here. The motherboard's pin header consists of 3. Some components are powered directly by the PSU, some receive power through the board, and some are a split of the two.
This is another small power reduction, though it's primarily a decision made in favor of noise levels. Depending on the device, this sometimes makes assumptions of other system components — if it's a higher-end GPU, the minimum PSU spec may be assuming higher-end accompanying components, which will draw more power. You can also compare rates between States and view the average cost in the US, which is what we will use for our comparison.
The average electricity cost in the US is 13 cents per kWh; this means that it costs 13 cents to run something that consumes watts for one hour.
To calculate the cost of running your PC at full load for one hour, you need to divide the watt usage by and multiply the result by your kWh. If your PC uses watts while gaming, then one hour of play time would cost you just under 4 cents. But, if we extrapolate that over a year at two hours a day, it can start to add up.
The budget build would cost you 29 dollars a year to run, while the extreme build would run you 77 dollars a year, nearly double the price.
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