How to Cut Your Gaming Computer Energy Cost

For the average gamer, playing for five to seven hours a day uses up to one hundred and thirty watts, or the equivalent of three Energy Star refrigerators. Those who play for more than seven and a half hours a day will consume about three thousand watts. That’s more than two thousand kilowatts a month, which costs about forty dollars, depending on the kWh rate in your area.

If you want to know the exact amount of watts your gaming PC will use each hour, you can buy a power meter. It’s also important to check the efficiency of the power supply on your system. You should use a fifty-percent capacity power supply to save the most energy.

The CPU in your PC requires the most power. It performs billions of calculations per second. When it’s overclocked, it produces more heat. This causes the cooling fan to run more often. However, you can reduce the power consumed by a few percent by adjusting operational settings on the CPU and motherboard. Another method is to upgrade your HDD to a solid state drive. A 1 TB HDD will draw only 10 watts, while a SSD with similar features will pull 5.5 watts.

Changing the settings on your PC’s graphics processing unit will also help reduce energy consumption. More efficient displays will cut total energy use by nearly half. Additionally, the ’80plus’ program, a voluntary initiative, is improving the performance of power supplies.

In addition, a recent study conducted by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory analyzed the impact of high-performance PCs on household energy consumption. The results show that if current growth trends continue, total gaming-related energy demand could rise by 114% by 2021.

Gaming PCs currently account for about twenty percent of the total energy used by personal computers. This may not sound like much, but it’s still significant. Approximately 72 million gamers will be using these devices in 2015. Even if you don’t consider yourself a gamer, you might be surprised at how much energy your computer is using.

Most people spend about four hours a day playing games on their computers. Depending on the software and game, a gaming PC will draw as much as 700 to 800 watts. Alternatively, if you’re a gamer who uses a laptop, your system will draw less than a third of this.

To find out how many watts your PC will use, start by checking your local power company’s website. Some companies have variable rates for different times of the day, so you’ll need to make sure you’re paying the right price.

A gaming PC can be expensive. In fact, the average cost of owning a gaming PC is about $10 billion. Considering that one gaming PC can power as many as ten standard computers, it’s no surprise that the total energy usage of a PC is significant.

One of the biggest drivers of demand is the increase in the number of players. Compared to just a few years ago, the number of people playing games on their PCs has increased by an impressive 76 percent. While virtual reality is increasing demand, it’s also driving more efficient hardware.