Gaming & power usage

[LadyCrimson]

With huge energy rate hikes here lately, I was just curious...I know PC's are rated for certain wattage use & depends on hardware etc. and they will suck up less during idle or low-use tasks...but do current high-powered pc's, video cards, and games suck up tons of kwh if you're an avid gamer? I saw one webpage saying the xbox360 is about 180 watts while playing. People talk of needing the 700W power supplies to run some newer video cards...I understand that's because of needing occasional peak power...but what might the average wattage use actually be while playing Far Cry on that souped up PC? 300? 500?

 

Side note:

Hubby, with a tester, estimates he's using 500+ watts between his always-on old PC's (no gaming), monitor, external firewall, routers, cable modem, etc etc...which equals roughly 1/3-1/2 of the kwh we use monthly.

Edited October 1, 2009 by LadyCrimson

[Gorgon]

Yeah it's pretty scary. According to the comparison chart that came with my last bill I average the same as a family of three.

 

I'm trying to get a handle on it by putting the computer power lines into the same extension and purposely switching it off whenever I leave the house or sit down to read.

[mkreku]

Um, you need to tell your hubby to get one of these:

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....ebone%20Systems

 

..if he's going to have it on at all times. The Asrock averages around 60W, probably less idle. It will still do everything an old computer does, and better.

 

---

 

I use a quad core CPU and a 4870, and I calculated that my peak would be somewhere around 400W (worst case scenario). ATI GPU's are notoriously bad when it comes to idle power usage so I'd say I average around 200-250W at all times and much more when I am gaming.

[LadyCrimson]

Hubby usually only has 2-4 pc's on 24/7. He said recently that he's "almost ready" to switch from his 12 old servers-he doesn't have all 12 on all the time-to maybe 3 or 4 newer ones (having just one will NOT work for him at all), but even if that were the case, those 3-4 would still be on all the time...even more so since everything from all 12 would be on them and he couldn't shut off the not-being-used servers/OS's separately anymore.

 

And the firewall/routers/modem etc. would still be on 24/7...because if they weren't, my pc's couldn't connect to the internet at 2am. Can't have that. *ahem*

 

So if I buy the fancy new rig I'd like, I can maybe expect to be sucking up 200-400w when I play games. Sigh. All right.

 

We use an average of 1000kwh per month in this tiny house...and that's living literally in the dark most of the time. All curly flores. bulbs, usually not on. People in our town are complaining of errors because they're getting bills of $500-600 for what feels like bare minimum usage, but I'm guessing most don't realize how much power they're really sucking up, and the rates are really monstrous now for anything over 500kwh a month. Turning off lights and not running the AC doesn't cut it anymore...

[LadyCrimson]

Just wanted to report that the new i7 rig, using the volt meter, suggests that I'm only using about 130w when at idle/web surfing.

 

When I put in a simpler game (ie, not graphic hogging etc) and play, it's about 180-200w.

Actually not as bad as I was envisioning...tho I'm sure something like Crysis maxed out would up that another 100w.

[Kaftan Barlast]

You have to count monitors, speakers and so on aswell. I happen to have a wattmeter laying around here, but I need to modify something so I can connect it to the wall socket, right now its only got sensors for naked cables.

[LadyCrimson]

Yeah...I was just curious about the new PC itself, not the total of everything I use. With the articles talking about peak power of the newer GPU's etc I was expecting more average consumption. Since I often have 2 pc's going+monitor+my speakers(nothing fancy, but they still suck a bit of power), I'd guess at idle or casual use I'm up around 250w average. Which doesn't sound too awful until I start counting how many hours per day they're on.

 

Interestingly, this Asus mobo has a software feature ala hibernate/sleep to turn pc "off" w/out disturbing your work...when I use it, the volmeter drops not at all, maybe 1-3w at the most...making me think such "power saving" features don't really make much of a difference. Not sure tho.

[Walsingham]

I've been wondering this very thing. If power continues to rise it may actually become cheaper for me to work from a cafe than from home.