Energy Efficient PC Build, Laptop, NUC?...

jake000

jake000

jake000

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28 Jun 2006
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Hello everyone :)

My current specs are:

AMD 3600
MSI B450 Carbon AC
32Gb 3600MHz Ram
Zotac 3060
An M.2 boot drive, SSD for games and random storage drives.

I don't game much anymore but tend to stream things to the TV (PC used to be in the living room but moved it upstairs). I play a bit of Fortnite and then Roblox with my son.

I leave my computer on for about 12 hours a day but with electricity costing so much now, I want to move to something more energy efficient.

I don't know if I should keep my PC for when I need a bit more power and then get an older laptop, NUC or something else and leave that on instead. It would need to stream 4K and run roblox at the most. I'm open to suggestions because energy efficient computing isn't something I've ever tried.

What are your suggestions please? Budget is the cheaper the better but if a new build is a good option that is energy efficient, I would look into that cost as well.

Thank you :)
 
You could go for a Asrock desk mini or a NUC. What is your PC idling at? You can usually drop Ryzen systems quite a bit (up to 20 watts at idle) by tuning them.
 
Thank you for your suggestions. The Asrock desk mini looks nice. I would think around 100-150 watts. I've only ever overclocked and added more voltage, I've never undervolted or tuned one. Sounds like a good idea though :)
 
jake000 said:
I would think around 100-150 watts. I've only ever overclocked and added more voltage, I've never undervolted or tuned one. Sounds like a good idea though :)
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At the desktop? :o Are you sure? That would be crazy, even for Ryzen. Are you running a permanent overclock? I'd expect it to be around 50-60 watts at the wall, untuned, unless your other storage devices are old HDDs that don't spin down.
 
Tetras said:
At the desktop? :o Are you sure? That would be crazy, even for Ryzen. Are you running a permanent overclock? I'd expect it to be around 50-60 watts at the wall, untuned, unless your other storage devices are old HDDs that don't spin down.
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My 5950x, 1060 etc idles under 100w, including the monitor, so yeah I'd expect the OP's to be similar, even under gaming it's only about 250w.... might be worth them grabbing a plugin meter to check everything because it might not be as much they think.

@jake000 - check the bios for 'eco mode' on the cpu which should lower the cpu down to a lower tdp etc, not 100% sure it's available with your setup but it's worth a check.
I'd maybe undervolt and/or down clock the gpu too because none of the games you've mentioned should be stressing out the 3060...

And I'm going to play devils advocate here.... you know your budget or how much you ideally want to spend, now divide that by 365 for a daily amount - in my opinion you need to pay off the outlay in a year for it make sense. The odds are you're going to be spending more than £365 so you need to save at least £1+ a day really for this new build to 'break even' in a year or so. That's like 3 units at current prices or 0.25 unit or 250w savings an hour if you divide it by 12 hours.... honestly you'd struggle to do that imo.

Sometimes it's 'better' to just stick with what you have and suck up the extra cost of running your existing build.
 
lsg1r said:
My 5950x, 1060 etc idles under 100w, including the monitor, so yeah I'd expect the OP's to be similar, even under gaming it's only about 250w.... might be worth them grabbing a plugin meter to check everything because it might not be as much they think.
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As far as I know, a Ryzen system (DGPU) starts about 25. I spent way too much time looking at this stuff, but it goes something like:

RAM above 2666/1.2v +10 (+2 for each pair). Steam/Discord open +10. B350/B450 +10 (+15 high end); X570 +15 (+25 high end); GPU +5 (+25 high end).
 
Thank you for the help and replies. It's been a very busy day!

I am probably way off with what I thought it idled at, ooops! I've picked up a plug in meter to check it properly :)

That's all really helpful and gives me some options and stuff to think about. As mentioned though, it might be better to stuck with what I have.
Thank you :)
 
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