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The power cost of running my enthusiast build is on the order of a few dollars a month. Now I am all for being green but there are things in my household that

The power cost of running my enthusiast build is on the order of a few dollars a month. Now I am all for being green but there are things in my household that are much more of a concern than this. Huge datacenters full of these chips is one thing. A personal computer for hacking & gaming probably not such a big deal.

barrkel 4y ago
24h x 30 days x .5kW x 0.25 CHF/kWh gives me 90 CHF a month to run my PC, assuming it never sleeps. Have you run the calculation? It's worthwhile configuring suspend for PCs these days. My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.
- maccard 4y ago
  And double that number if you're in the UK.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nightski 4y ago
  I use suspend on my PC and I definitely do not run it 24h, or anywhere close to that. Also power is $0.08/kWh where I live.
  - gambiting 4y ago
    That's insanely cheap power, use it while you can. I'm paying £0.40/kWh, so about 46 cents per kWh.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    Really? My power is some of the cheapest in the country and we pay ~13 cents/kWh. It's a little misleading though since my bill breaks out generation and distribution costs into separate line items. They are both billed per kWH though and add up to 13 cents.
    - nightski 4y ago
      Yes. We have a fixed basic connection charge of $20. So it's really close to your $0.13/kWh when that is taken into account. I wasn't trying to be misleading though because the point is the basic charge does not increase with usage. So for each additional kWh we add to that it's only $0.089/kWh.
      - brewdad 4y ago
        No, that's fair. I have an additional basic charge too. Congrats on the cheap power.
- loeg 4y ago
  > 500W 500W is a very high average power consumption. And my electricity is 0.13 USD/kWh, which is about half 0.25 CHF/kWh. True average power is probably below 100W, for a total cost in the realm of 10 CHF or USD per month.
  - Someone 4y ago
    In the USA, for a significant part of the year, chances are you have to add the electricity costs of running your airconditioning to get rid of that heat. If you’re living in a colder state, you may have to subtract the costs of having lower heating costs.
    - loeg 4y ago
      Sure, although it's not a ton of heat either way and doesn't make a large impact on the net cost.
  - epolanski 4y ago
    The lowest contract you can get in italy is 40 cents. Also, consuming more energy is bad and this rush to apologize lack of innovation in gpu and cpus weve seen in the last decade is ridiculous. Where does it end? I'm okay with a 5000cc truck because airplanes and cruise ships are much worse?
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      the last 2-3 generations of cpus and gpus have seen the most innovation, efficiency, and performance gains in a long time. If you don't want to drive a 5l truck, don't drive one, but 500W is not an average load, and if you have high electricity costs thats a you problem not an everyone else problem. The largest parts of my electrical bill are distribution and overhead charges that don't change whether I use power or not. The marginal utility of the power vs the cost is quite reasonable.
      - epolanski 4y ago
        You and me are seeing very different news if you dont see midrange gpus consumimg 250w under load and cpus getting over 100. The performance gains are non existent and largely driven by bigger and bigger chips on smaller nodes. There is no innovation in gpu and x86 cpus space since a long time, that happens only on arm nowadays.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- xani_ 4y ago
  The fuck are those calculations ? Are you trying to mislead people on purpose? Who is running their computer at 500W 24/7 ?
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > 24h x 30 days x .5kW No modern PC should be pulling 500W all the time. Idle power can be as low as 20-30W depending on the build. You should also allow it to sleep, of course. > My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing. Something is wrong. A 3090 should only pull about 20 Watts at idle: https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-review-a-compute-powerhouse/7/ https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-review-... . You might have some process forcing it into full-speed 3D mode for some reason.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    Windows indexing service.
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  500W 24/7 consumption? What do you do? Train ML non-stop? Your example is in now representative of reality.
black_knight 4y ago
Also, considering that the used power becomes heat, it is not such a waste if you already have inefficient electrical heating.
- epolanski 4y ago
  Conversely, it makes summer much worse.
  - redeeman 4y ago
    perhaps.. you can easily equalize indoor temperature to outdoors, so if you're not cooling, it makes no difference. sucks if you run an AC though :)
    - epolanski 4y ago
      I don't use AC I think it's terrible to waste energy like that. I can understandan office or hospital, but home? I'm from southern italy, it's hot, you sweat, you don't need to burn gas, coal or build infrastructure so people waste it to cool their room, this is so entitled and no wonder we're in full climate crisis. People can't give up on anything really. It gets worse everyday and people's remedy is to make it even worse,. Nonsense. So yes, it makes things much worse with a hot pc in the room.
gambiting 4y ago
Yeah that's not true, at least here in the UK it isn't. My normal build will use 500W when gaming, so every couple hours that's £0.40. Every 10 hours is £4. That's just few days of gaming for me, not including all the other computer use, definitely adds up over a month, especially since my bills used to be £100/month now they are £300 a month.
- lmm 4y ago
  Using your own numbers, if you're spending 200/month more on gaming then that's 500 hours/month or approximately every waking hour. Are you really gaming that much? And even if you are, that's a lot cheaper than practically any other hobby you could spend that much time on.
  - gambiting 4y ago
    I never said I spend £200 on gaming? I just said that my bills have increased from 100 a month to 300, but that's due to rising energy costs in the UK, not my gaming habits . It's more that in addition to my bill literally tripling, costs of gaming aren't insignificant for me. It doesn't matter that it's still cheap for the type of entertainment - it adds up. Ever pound spend this way is not a pound spent on something else.
    - lmm 4y ago
      > It's more that in addition to my bill literally tripling, costs of gaming aren't insignificant for me. It doesn't matter that it's still cheap for the type of entertainment - it adds up. Ever pound spend this way is not a pound spent on something else. Sounds like a route to being penny-wise and pound-foolish. If you cut cheap entertainment you may well end up spending more (because in practice it's very hard to just sit in a room doing nothing), and if your gaming costs are a lot smaller than your energy bills then the cost should be relatively insignificant, almost by definition.
      - gambiting 4y ago
        Well the discussion started with saying "why would enthusiasts care about their energy consumption" - so my point isn't that I'm going to cut out entertainment altogether, but for my next GPU I will definitely look at the energy consumption and there is zero chance I'm buying a 500W monster, even if I can afford the energy for it. It's just stupid and wasteful. I might go with a xx60 series instead, just because the TDP will be more reasonable. Or alternatively I might play the same games on my Xbox Series S which provides me with the same entertainment yet uses 1/6th of the energy of my PC when gaming.

barrkel 4y ago

24h x 30 days x .5kW x 0.25 CHF/kWh gives me 90 CHF a month to run my PC, assuming it never sleeps. Have you run the calculation? It's worthwhile configuring suspend for PCs these days. My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.

maccard 4y ago
And double that number if you're in the UK.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nightski 4y ago
I use suspend on my PC and I definitely do not run it 24h, or anywhere close to that. Also power is $0.08/kWh where I live.
- gambiting 4y ago
  That's insanely cheap power, use it while you can. I'm paying £0.40/kWh, so about 46 cents per kWh.
- brewdad 4y ago
  Really? My power is some of the cheapest in the country and we pay ~13 cents/kWh. It's a little misleading though since my bill breaks out generation and distribution costs into separate line items. They are both billed per kWH though and add up to 13 cents.
  - nightski 4y ago
    Yes. We have a fixed basic connection charge of $20. So it's really close to your $0.13/kWh when that is taken into account. I wasn't trying to be misleading though because the point is the basic charge does not increase with usage. So for each additional kWh we add to that it's only $0.089/kWh.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      No, that's fair. I have an additional basic charge too. Congrats on the cheap power.
loeg 4y ago
> 500W 500W is a very high average power consumption. And my electricity is 0.13 USD/kWh, which is about half 0.25 CHF/kWh. True average power is probably below 100W, for a total cost in the realm of 10 CHF or USD per month.
- Someone 4y ago
  In the USA, for a significant part of the year, chances are you have to add the electricity costs of running your airconditioning to get rid of that heat. If you’re living in a colder state, you may have to subtract the costs of having lower heating costs.
  - loeg 4y ago
    Sure, although it's not a ton of heat either way and doesn't make a large impact on the net cost.
- epolanski 4y ago
  The lowest contract you can get in italy is 40 cents. Also, consuming more energy is bad and this rush to apologize lack of innovation in gpu and cpus weve seen in the last decade is ridiculous. Where does it end? I'm okay with a 5000cc truck because airplanes and cruise ships are much worse?
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    the last 2-3 generations of cpus and gpus have seen the most innovation, efficiency, and performance gains in a long time. If you don't want to drive a 5l truck, don't drive one, but 500W is not an average load, and if you have high electricity costs thats a you problem not an everyone else problem. The largest parts of my electrical bill are distribution and overhead charges that don't change whether I use power or not. The marginal utility of the power vs the cost is quite reasonable.
    - epolanski 4y ago
      You and me are seeing very different news if you dont see midrange gpus consumimg 250w under load and cpus getting over 100. The performance gains are non existent and largely driven by bigger and bigger chips on smaller nodes. There is no innovation in gpu and x86 cpus space since a long time, that happens only on arm nowadays.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xani_ 4y ago
The fuck are those calculations ? Are you trying to mislead people on purpose? Who is running their computer at 500W 24/7 ?
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> 24h x 30 days x .5kW No modern PC should be pulling 500W all the time. Idle power can be as low as 20-30W depending on the build. You should also allow it to sleep, of course. > My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing. Something is wrong. A 3090 should only pull about 20 Watts at idle: https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-review-a-compute-powerhouse/7/ https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-review-... . You might have some process forcing it into full-speed 3D mode for some reason.
- hulitu 4y ago
  Windows indexing service.
bufferoverflow 4y ago
500W 24/7 consumption? What do you do? Train ML non-stop? Your example is in now representative of reality.

black_knight 4y ago

Also, considering that the used power becomes heat, it is not such a waste if you already have inefficient electrical heating.

epolanski 4y ago
Conversely, it makes summer much worse.
- redeeman 4y ago
  perhaps.. you can easily equalize indoor temperature to outdoors, so if you're not cooling, it makes no difference. sucks if you run an AC though :)
  - epolanski 4y ago
    I don't use AC I think it's terrible to waste energy like that. I can understandan office or hospital, but home? I'm from southern italy, it's hot, you sweat, you don't need to burn gas, coal or build infrastructure so people waste it to cool their room, this is so entitled and no wonder we're in full climate crisis. People can't give up on anything really. It gets worse everyday and people's remedy is to make it even worse,. Nonsense. So yes, it makes things much worse with a hot pc in the room.

gambiting 4y ago

Yeah that's not true, at least here in the UK it isn't. My normal build will use 500W when gaming, so every couple hours that's £0.40. Every 10 hours is £4. That's just few days of gaming for me, not including all the other computer use, definitely adds up over a month, especially since my bills used to be £100/month now they are £300 a month.

lmm 4y ago
Using your own numbers, if you're spending 200/month more on gaming then that's 500 hours/month or approximately every waking hour. Are you really gaming that much? And even if you are, that's a lot cheaper than practically any other hobby you could spend that much time on.
- gambiting 4y ago
  I never said I spend £200 on gaming? I just said that my bills have increased from 100 a month to 300, but that's due to rising energy costs in the UK, not my gaming habits . It's more that in addition to my bill literally tripling, costs of gaming aren't insignificant for me. It doesn't matter that it's still cheap for the type of entertainment - it adds up. Ever pound spend this way is not a pound spent on something else.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > It's more that in addition to my bill literally tripling, costs of gaming aren't insignificant for me. It doesn't matter that it's still cheap for the type of entertainment - it adds up. Ever pound spend this way is not a pound spent on something else. Sounds like a route to being penny-wise and pound-foolish. If you cut cheap entertainment you may well end up spending more (because in practice it's very hard to just sit in a room doing nothing), and if your gaming costs are a lot smaller than your energy bills then the cost should be relatively insignificant, almost by definition.
    - gambiting 4y ago
      Well the discussion started with saying "why would enthusiasts care about their energy consumption" - so my point isn't that I'm going to cut out entertainment altogether, but for my next GPU I will definitely look at the energy consumption and there is zero chance I'm buying a 500W monster, even if I can afford the energy for it. It's just stupid and wasteful. I might go with a xx60 series instead, just because the TDP will be more reasonable. Or alternatively I might play the same games on my Xbox Series S which provides me with the same entertainment yet uses 1/6th of the energy of my PC when gaming.