How much does it cost to run my PC?

HungryHippos

HungryHippos

HungryHippos

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hey guys, wondering if someone in the know can say how much it might cost to run my PC?

The reason I ask is that apparently our electricity bill has gone up about a 3rd since April this year, and my rents think it might be my PC.

I leave my PC off during the days when I am at work and overnight the majority of the time (90-95%) but it's on most evenings and weekends pretty much the whole time, obviously not drawing full load power or anything.

I guess in order to find out how much it costs you need to know how much power it's drawing, and for how long, so for a rough figure I would like to use a benchmark of 10 hours a day powered up as an average.

I have the following spec:

Corsair 1000W PSU
i7 920 @ stock
Gigabyte EX-58 Extreme motherboard
Ati 4870x2 card with Arctic Cooler (though I doubt the cooler will really have any impact on power consumption)
2 x Raptors in raid 0
2 x Samsung 1TB drives
NEC DVD writer, not sure of spec
3-4 120mm case fans in total including the ones on the CPU
 
If you want to know for sure, get hold of a power metre to plug into the wall, it'll tell you exactly how much it's drawing, you can work out from that how much it costs per hour.

Otherwise it's just calculated guesswork, I'd say that at idle it won't use more than 200W, assuming that speedstep is enabled. At load, maybe 700W or so.


mjt said:
well it's going to draw 1000W isn't it?
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I hope that you're being sarcastic.
 
\o/

on a serious note, it's not really possible to find out what the average draw is without measuring it.
unless someone can find the wattage for all the individual components in his pc

or, you could just turn it off at night for a while and see how much it affects your leccy bill

it'll be a massive difference
 
Do a search mate, this has come up loads,

I got a little power meter from ebay for a tenner which tells me what it's drawing.
 
PSU Might be rated at 1000w but it wont be using that much, probably about 600-700w in use, which is 7 times the power usage of a 100w light bulb.

Based on current prices, if you PC was using 700 watts, left on for 8 hours a day for a month (30 day month) it would cost you £16.80 pence in electricity.

Works out at ~10p per KiloWatt of electricty an hour. A kettle uses about 2.4Kw so to boil a kettle (2-3 minutes of use) costs about 3 pence.
 
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To be honest an approximation is better than nothing :)

If I was to say it was drawing an average of 400-450W for 10 hours a day (probably this is higher than reality as I don't really ever use it on full load) what kind of expenditure per month would this be expected to come to?
 
Eulogy said:
To be honest an approximation is better than nothing :)

If I was to say it was drawing an average of 400-450W for 10 hours a day (probably this is higher than reality as I don't really ever use it on full load) what kind of expenditure per month would this be expected to come to?
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If you just look at what he's said and then change it to what wattage you are using and then find out the average price of your electricity bills then I'm sure you can work it out. Although it's probably going to be lower than the approximation you were given. :)
 
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Eulogy said:
To be honest an approximation is better than nothing :)

If I was to say it was drawing an average of 400-450W for 10 hours a day (probably this is higher than reality as I don't really ever use it on full load) what kind of expenditure per month would this be expected to come to?
Click to expand...

Thats ~£13 quids worth of electricity a month. 10p/Kw is only a guess though, you will have to check the electricity bill to get the correct figure.
 
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J.B said:
Do a search mate, this has come up loads,

I got a little power meter from ebay for a tenner which tells me what it's drawing.
Click to expand...

It's been mentioned a few times but I think it's a good idea and will look at getting one of these power meters to find out for sure, thanks :)
 
Most likely the electricity has gone up by a third because your tariff has changed.
If you used any air con in the summer that would be another explanation.

If it's on 10hrs a day drawing say 300W average power that would mean 3kWh a day. Depending on your tariff a kWh should only be around 10p or so (maybe a bit more) so I'd be surprised if your computer was costing any more than say 50p a day to run, plus a bit for any other peripherals of course.

Why not just give your parents say an extra £15/month rent which should roughly cover the cost of running your PC, should shut them up :)
 
I have a power meter here and a gaming rig with a 650w PSU, I'll plug in later and let you know what's what on my rig, will get you in the ball park at least.
 
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