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How much power does a PC actually take up?

A

Ace69

Senior member
After reading the other post of "Do you guy ever shut down your computer?", it reminded me of a question that I was wondering about.

How much power does a PC take up? My roomates are saying that I am using up too much power by leaving my PC on all the time, but it doesn't seem like it would take up that much.

Does anyone have any links on this? I don't want to leave it on if it is costing me 20 bux/month.


Adam
 
You can't be sure without actually measuring it.

What I remember is the whole electricity bill was around $9 a month when I lived by myself with PC on 24/7. Subtracting the part used by lights and refriger, it's likely $5-6 a month if you turn off the monitor at nights.
 
It depends how much the computer is being used at the time. When idle, I hear ballpark of high two digit watts.




<< well, the ps is 250-350 watts usually so it's like a few light bulbs plus the monitor....... >>




Just cause the power supply is marked XXX watts doesn't mean it's running at that amount.

 
The power supply wattage is an UPPER limit, you will not use more then that for the PC alone. It is good number to use for figureing cost. Again that will be the upper limit. Take your power supply wattage, convert to kilowatts (divide by 1000) so 300W supply is .3KW. Look at your power bill and compute what a KW-Hr costs. Now multiply that number by the KW of your system, you now have a number that will reflect the MAX that it could cost to run your system for an hour. Of course your monitor will be on top of that.
 
If you leave your moniter off and you put your computer in some kind of idle or hibernate state, it shouldnt required much power at all.
 
If I leave my computer on all the time and cracking RC-5, it costs about $5 month for a Celeron 800 with the monitor on standby half of the time.
 
I think that for 5 bux a month, I can afford to leave it on all the time 🙂 Thanks for the info.
 
I figured up for the monitor awhile back, on 24/7 it was around 6bux, but I don't leave it on all the time of course. Don't know about the computer, but it's small enough I'm not going to worry about it. Then again, I don't live in Cali 🙂
 
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