Okay, let's calculate. At 20 Mbps, 40GB takes a bit over 4 hours to download. Supposing you have an idle power draw of 60W, that's 0.240 KWh. I think that's re

Okay, let's calculate. At 20 Mbps, 40GB takes a bit over 4 hours to download. Supposing you have an idle power draw of 60W, that's 0.240 KWh. I think that's reasonable. Downloading is almost effortless for a modern computer, and I'll assume that you're not getting any more use of it, so the monitor turned itself off. Now compare that to a CPU easily having a TDP of 100W, plus a GPU drawing 180W, plus the rest of the computer, plus a monitor, etc, you can easily reach 400W. That'll blow through the power you consumed to download in half an hour. Also I don't think anyone releases 40GB patches on a daily basis, so if you game for say, 3 hours a day for a week, the costs of the download is already down to 3%. Which again is what I was getting at: you should optimize the biggest sources of waste first. Anything that makes your actual gameplay more efficient and consume less CPU or CPU resources will decrease your consumption far more noticeably than almost any optimization you can do to downloading stuff.