Does Leaving PC on Damage Components

[Royboibtw]

Hi Everyone

 

I was wondering if I leave my PC on when Im not using it. Would that damage its components?

 

Roy

[GenericFanboy]

Aslong as your PSU isnt some cheap knockoff kind of thing, And you put it on that weird sleep mode. Should be okay. But; why would you have to leave it on?

[George.]

Not really if you keep it clean in terms of dust and you don't run benchmarks or stress tests all night. If your work requires rendering over a night or something then at least it's for work purposes. If you're just lazy to turn it off you're wasting electricity more than you're causing hardware damage.

Only mechanical components wear out from prolonged usage. That'd be your fans and mechanical hard drive. 

Electronics won't really degrade from this. Ofcourse if you're letting it do sth heavy all night, the heat generated by the high power consumption will shorten your components' life in the long run.

However if it's sort of AFK-ing, then only your hdd might start failing sooner than it would if you were to not leave it on and your fans might need maintenance at some point. 

However it's healthy for all components to shut your pc down from time to time.  

As far as liquid cooling, I'm not too savvy in that field but I assume you will reduce your pump's life expectancy. 

P.S. If your PSU is crappy you could have some serious problems. From crashes and lag to setting your house on fire (yes it has happened to people with jackass chinese PSUs they got outta the dumpster  )

[ACV]

I don't think so really, waste of electricity is your main thing. If you're running a high voltage boost overclock & something is keeping your CPU busy, that might be a bad thing.

 

I've had several AIOs fail, ceasing up after being turned off for a couple of weeks on holiday  if that factors into your thought process. 

[TrainFan475]

I've never had any problems doing it. My family computer is on almost 24/7 (because no one likes waiting for it to wake up from sleep) and it still works fine. I put my pc in sleep mode when I'm not using it.

[circeseye]

considering ive never shut my pc off (except for hardware upgrades) over the last 7+ years id say no (full on. i dont use sleep or hibernate). just an occasional restart now and then usually for software updates. 

[LogicalDrm]

No. PC hardware is designed to be run all the time at max performance. Only thing you really need to check is how high your temps get as if it overheats, there will be auto-shutdown which can mess up things.

[LloydLynx]

I have an old HP dc5800 core 2 quad running a 24/7 Minecraft server, never had issues. The thing was packed with dust when my dad found it in the e-waste at his work(hospital), so who knows, it might have run all day every day of it's life. The life expectancy of an HDD running 24/7 is about 4 years.

I think fans run much longer since I've seen plenty of old PC's with good fans, never any bad ones.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Royboibtw said:

Hi Everyone

 

I was wondering if I leave my PC on when Im not using it. Would that damage its components?

 

Roy

 

It depends. Properly engineered hardware is fine. Cheap, disposable hardware has a poor build quality, and thus the cheaper materials don't last as long.

 

Like, don't leave your computer screen on, even if you have a screen saver. OLED's will "burn" into the screen like a CRT does, LED backlit screens will get gradually dimmer, CFL backlit screens will have the ballast die and the screen will discolor. Cheap screens will just have the power supply go bang.

 

I've actually had all chinese-brand monitors die on me, so I won't buy or recommend them. If it were a law that all electronics must have a lifetime warranty, no Chinese-brand electronics would ever find their ways into stores.

 

Mechanical drives, strangely enough have a better life than SSD's. If you have SSD's in your system, and you're on an OS that obsessively logs things, then you'll wear out the drive pretty darn fast.

 

Fans will wear out, usually the bearings, though higher quality fans never get this way, unless you have long hair, pets, or a dusty/smokey environment.

 

Which comes down to the "Should I turn my PC off?" If you want to save energy, yes, but otherwise, a desktop PC is better left on, a laptop is better off in sleep mode rather than turning it off. Sleep mode will put less wear on the battery than leaving it on. 

 

Thin laptops tend to wear out batteries, usually within two years. Very little can be done about this. I've received new laptops with 10% of the battery life already reduced. 

[The Torrent]

2 hours ago, TrainFan2019 said:

I've never had any problems doing it. My family computer is on almost 24/7 (because no one likes waiting for it to wake up from sleep) and it still works fine. I put my pc in sleep mode when I'm not using it.

u really need a ssd in 2019

[Mira Yurizaki]

4 hours ago, Royboibtw said:

I was wondering if I leave my PC on when Im not using it. Would that damage its components?

If you're doing something while the PC is on, like churning through videos or whatnot, then the higher heat they put out will accelerate its degradation over time. But the life span of hardware is such a far out unknown that it's not worth losing sleep over.

 

Otherwise it doesn't really matter.

[nightmarevoid]

Interesting question, with an interesting answer. the only components which may get damaged are the ones in your fans and your power supply, but any good power supply will be fine. The truth is, most components do better when being always on. This is because the constant heating and cooling of your PC power cycling can degrade components, but keeping it on will keep everything around 30 Celsius. While the computer will still heat up more while using it for anything strenuous, the temperature difference between idle and a full load will be less than a full load and off. So yeah, unless a fan starts making noise you should leave it on. Power use is another thing, but computer hardware is pretty efficient now.

[Giganthrax]

Unless there's a specific reason to leave your PC on, I don't see why you'd do it?

 

Leaving your PC on does the following:

- wears down mechanical parts (fans and hdd)

- draws power (not a lot, but it does)

- may damage power supply in case of power surge etc.

- makes it possible for hackers or trojans or w/e to tamper with your machine (they can't hack a computer that's powered off).

 

[daChurchPcGuy]

I used to be on the vendor side of the business and I've been running my PCs 24/7 for decades.  Keep it clean and you shouldn't have any problems if you have decent hardware.

 

[thrasher_565]

seems that all my components that failed was do to turning the pc off. maybe voltage spike? i leave my pc on 24/7 too. at the end of the day pc last long enough that your probably upgrade before your pc implodes. but other say everything will die at some point. you can buy the best of the best and it can still die so w/e. my pc uses 30 watts at idal thats everything and my cpu temps  around 50c and gpu 35c

[Pasi123]

My main PC have been running almost 24/7 since 2016 and none of the components have failed. The oldest hard drive in my PC has 26321 hours of power on time (1096 days which is 3 years) and power on count 283.

[Mira Yurizaki]

10 hours ago, thrasher_565 said:

seems that all my components that failed was do to turning the pc off. maybe voltage spike?

If it was a voltage spike, that sounds more like a shoddy PSU than the act of turning a PC off, considering how many other people can turn their PCs off without issue.

[mariushm]

No. In fact, there's an argument for a PC lasting longer if you leave computer running 24/7. The only downside is waste of electricity, everything else is very small "wear and tear", practically irrelevant.

 

Startup and shut down are the most intensive things a computer faces and the moments where there's the highest risk of components failing. Once everything runs, the chances of failure are much smaller.

 

If you had fans sit still for long periods of times, it's possible that the oil inside the axis pooled down and it's no longer properly lubricating the fan. When you start it, it takes a few rotations until the fan sucks up the pooled oil and lubes the axis (depending on fan design).

 

At startup, you have transition from colder temperature to operating temperatures, so for example hdd platters expand a couple of times as they warm up to normal operating temps (the friction with the air inside the drive heats them up, and the pressure inside the mechanical drives needs to balance a couple times etc)

In extreme scenarios... If you're in a country with humidity in air, it's possible over time (days to weeks of no use) for humidity to be absorbed inside chips so when you turn on the circuit board and the chip gets hot very quickly, the water particles inside could turn into gas and blow the chip. 

Water can be absorbed in glass fibers of the circuit board as well, causing shorts between layers.

If the pc runs 24/7 and the motherboard stays warm due to electricity going through it, this doesn't happen.

 

There's just as high or even higher risk that a mechanical drive will die suddenly when you start the pc, compared to randomly dying while it's running 24/7. With mechanical drives, you also usually notice SMART errors start to pop up when things start to go bad, so you can react right away and backup data.

 

 

 

[smatts]

oops wrong post

Edited December 3, 2019 by smatts

[Srijan Verma]

On 12/2/2019 at 8:42 PM, circeseye said:

considering ive never shut my pc off (except for hardware upgrades) over the last 7+ years id say no (full on. i dont use sleep or hibernate). just an occasional restart now and then usually for software updates. 

you had us in the first half