Undervolting an old gtx 970 to save money?

[Djuntas]

So...my last electricity bill come in and im butt fucked....Has anyone ever done numbers on undervolting a GPU and how much one could save in money. My system is very old, because again no money, but my last bill is so high (A 105% rise, litteral doubble from last summer...) im at the point of not having money to use my computer...So anyone ever undervolted old GPU's and maybe a GTX 970? Are there any risk to also "messing" with old hardware...its been running since 2015 with no problems anyway.

[Needfuldoer]

Get yourself a Kill-a-Watt meter (or local equivalent) and see what your PC's actually drawing from the wall. (Then check other 'always on' devices.)

 

If you save 100 watts of peak load, that's only 1kWh of power saved for every 10 hours the PC's running.

 

Make sure you're following other power consumption best practices, like shutting down instead of leaving the PC running 24/7, turning off accessories like monitors and printers you're not using, making sure your windows aren't drafty... (On that note, I used to tape all the seams around my window sashes every winter before I had replacement windows installed. It made a difference. Air sealing the attic made an even bigger difference, but if you're a renter or you're in an apartment that's not going to be an option for you.)

 

3 minutes ago, Devryd said:

I dont have numbers for a 970 but I undervolted my 1070. It went from about 150W to 120W without loosing performance. Its not really a huge difference 

That's saving about 1 kWh every 33.334 hours of peak PC run time.

Edited November 2, 2022 by Needfuldoer

[Devryd]

I dont have numbers for a 970 but I undervolted my 1070. It went from about 150W to 120W without loosing performance. Its not really a huge difference 

[Djuntas]

Thanks guys  guess Im just fucked. Sigh. We'll thanks Putin....idk man. Overpopulation of the world, to many people. Doubt I can save much of my 120 watt TDP then...at least I think my asus strix 970 was that.

[Kisai]

23 minutes ago, Djuntas said:

So...my last electricity bill come in and im butt fucked....Has anyone ever done numbers on undervolting a GPU and how much one could save in money.

You would not save enough money to justify it. I'll give you an example.

My normal electricity bill (leaving the PC on, all the time) is $35

If I run a ML process on the (RTX 3070Ti/3090) GPU for half the days (basically 144 hours/mo) the bill goes up to $55.

 

That's explicitly running the GPU for far longer than I would normally run. Assuming that you could undervolt it by 10% of the watts at the outlet, you would ultimately make only a difference of $2.00

 

The only way you save significant money is by removing the GPU entirely. So if you were to upgrade the GPU (which costs like $900) you would never recover that cost to save the money in the upgrade unless your GPU accounts for $100 of the bill, by which then yes, a $900 upgrade might save more money in one year. But to save 2-10, it's not worth it. 

 

If you haven't done it yet, you would save more energy in reducing or replacing the lights you keep on. Because most LED lights are under 10w.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Djuntas said:

Thanks guys  guess Im just fucked. Sigh. We'll thanks Putin....idk man. Overpopulation of the world, to many people. Doubt I can save much of my 120 watt TDP then...at least I think my asus strix 970 was that.

Kill-a-watt is a brand name but it also describes an item.  Like jello.  They’re really handy for tracking down ghost power.  Any incandescent bulbs or suchlike?

[Needfuldoer]

7 minutes ago, Djuntas said:

Thanks guys  guess Im just fucked.

I think you'd be surprised how much of your power bill is actually attributable to your PC. Unless you're folding or running machine learning 24/7, it's not drawing that 170 watts all the time. (And it's definitely not drawing the 650 watts or however many your power supply is rated for.) At idle, most desktop PCs are well under 75 watts.

 

I highly recommend getting a Kill-a-Watt so you can see what your devices actually draw. Unplug devices you don't use all the time. Swap out any incandescent or halogen lights you have left for LEDs. Check for drafts and air leaks. And for the love of Crom, do not use electric space heaters.

[Djuntas]

3 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Kill-a-watt is a brand name but it also describes an item.  Like jello.  They’re really handy for tracking down ghost power.  Any incandescent bulbs or suchlike?

Wish I had something to cut. But ill stop using my bread toaster, avoid using the oven for food, and ill try remeber unplug the router/PC from the wall when I go to bed. Already saving on everything else...the 4-5 lights im my apartment is already LED's years ago.

[Bombastinator]

9 minutes ago, Kisai said:

You would not save enough money to justify it. I'll give you an example.

My normal electricity bill (leaving the PC on, all the time) is $35

If I run a ML process on the (RTX 3070Ti/3090) GPU for half the days (basically 144 hours/mo) the bill goes up to $55.

 

That's explicitly running the GPU for far longer than I would normally run. Assuming that you could undervolt it by 10% of the watts at the outlet, you would ultimately make only a difference of $2.00

 

The only way you save significant money is by removing the GPU entirely. So if you were to upgrade the GPU (which costs like $900) you would never recover that cost to save the money in the upgrade unless your GPU accounts for $100 of the bill, by which then yes, a $900 upgrade might save more money in one year. But to save 2-10, it's not worth it. 

 

If you haven't done it yet, you would save more energy in reducing or replacing the lights you keep on. Because most LED lights are under 10w.

It’s literally impossible for me to spend $35/mo because the basic service fee is higher than that.  The lowest I’ve ever heard of a bill being in my area is $55. Mine are commonly over a hundred each.  I got 2 not including building power. I own anapartment building so there’s the hallways that have to be lit 24/7, the basement, etc..  that’s over a hundred too but doesn’t really count.   My building costs a bit over a hundred/mo. And the garage where my electric car is is a bit over a hundred as well.  Considering the cost of fuel though $100/mo is nothing.

Edited November 2, 2022 by Bombastinator

[Bombastinator]

10 minutes ago, Djuntas said:

Wish I had something to cut. But ill stop using my bread toaster, avoid using the oven for food, and ill try remeber unplug the router/PC from the wall when I go to bed. Already saving on everything else...the 4-5 lights im my apartment is already LED's years ago.

The toaster uses. I have no idea how much power.  I’m remembering a thing where they powered a house with bicycles and the most terrifying appliance was the electric kettle. They all feared it.  There were like 20 bicycles and all together they could barely do it.  This is why the killawatt is handy. You can find out what is actually costing you money.  Perhaps replace your toaster with a toaster oven. That gets the toaster and the oven at once.

Edited November 2, 2022 by Bombastinator

[Bombastinator]

10 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

I think you'd be surprised how much of your power bill is actually attributable to your PC. Unless you're folding or running machine learning 24/7, it's not drawing that 170 watts all the time. (And it's definitely not drawing the 650 watts or however many your power supply is rated for.) At idle, most desktop PCs are well under 75 watts.

 

I highly recommend getting a Kill-a-Watt so you can see what your devices actually draw. Unplug devices you don't use all the time. Swap out any incandescent or halogen lights you have left for LEDs. Check for drafts and air leaks. And for the love of Crom, do not use electric space heaters.

This is the problem with the electric kettle.  It’s basically an electric space heater for water.

[WereCat]

The biggest issue with saving power when using PC is that during low/idle loads the PC is the most inefficient and it's drawing an absurd amount of power for what is doing. So in order to see biggest saving you would have to solve this issue... which is near impossible without spending money on components that allow you to do so and would initially cost way more than the saving you would achieve in a year or two.

 

So while undervolting is legit way to save some power. Undervolting GPU alone won't be enough. You should perhaps power limit / undervolt all components if possible. Obviously undervolting affects stability if you overdo it. There is not really a risk of harm to your HW it's just a time investment.

 

If your PC is constantly in medium to high load then undervolting may actually result in some nice savings but if most of the time you're idle to low/medium load then you may not really see much of a difference.

 

By idle to low loads I mean spending time on desktop browsing web or writing documents, watching videos, etc... So typically the most common things.

 

I can still recommend doing some undervolting, just don't expect too much. Having your monitor turn off faster when idle when you leave the PC alone will likely result in similar savings.

 

I think you will completely have to change your habits on how you use power in your home/apartment entirely to see a major benefit. PC alone won't really save you there which is unfortunate.

[PDifolco]

38 minutes ago, Djuntas said:

So...my last electricity bill come in and im butt fucked....Has anyone ever done numbers on undervolting a GPU and how much one could save in money. My system is very old, because again no money, but my last bill is so high (A 105% rise, litteral doubble from last summer...) im at the point of not having money to use my computer...So anyone ever undervolted old GPU's and maybe a GTX 970? Are there any risk to also "messing" with old hardware...its been running since 2015 with no problems anyway.

Undervolting didn't reduce power draw for me, it just allowed my GPU (3080 10GB basic model) to clock higher, like 1900MHz i/o 1800, still at 320W, as I'm not thermally constrained (on watercooling...)

To reduce power draw you just have to set a lower power cap in Afterburner, experimenting with that showed me that a 85% limit only has a small 8% performance reduction for -50W power draw

 

[mariushm]

15 minutes ago, Djuntas said:

... and ill try remeber unplug the router/PC from the wall when I go to bed. Already saving on everything else...the 4-5 lights im my apartment is already LED's years ago.

Those will be pointless. 

Your payment is a lot of fixed costs + some variable amount based on the amount of kWh consumed each month. 

You may have different cost based on how much kWh you consume each month... something like 0.02$ per kWh for the first 50kWh , 0.05$ per kWh for the next 200 kWh, 0.1$ for more than 250 kWh  ... of course, not dollars, but your local currency. 

 

A router will consume 1-2 watts an hour while it's working, so it would have to work 500 hours or 20 days to consume 1 kWh  ... so it basically consumes 0.1-0.2$ a month to keep it running. 

Your PC consumes less than 0.5w an hour while it's shut down and just plugged in the mains. It's the 5v stand-by which powers your motherboard and saves your CR2032 battery on your motherboard from discharging.  Unplug PC and in half a year to a year, you're gonna have to spend half a dollar (in your currency) to buy a CR2032 battery.

 

So what I'm trying to say is that even if you save a few kWh each month doing these tricks, you're STILL gonna be way above those thresholds where you pay a low amount for each kWh (for example if you consumed 150 kWh and now consume 145 kWh, you still pay a higher price for the 50 to 145 kWh range, if we go with the example above) , but your life will be so less fun. 

 

Get a power meter and measure things , doesn't have to be "kill-a-watt" brand, lots of other brands out there that do the same with reasonable accuracy.

 

[Needfuldoer]

13 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

The toaster uses. I have no idea how much power.

IIRC, North American electric code says sustained load cannot exceed 80% of a circuit's rating. So 1500 watts sustained on a 15 amp 120v circuit. Most toaster ovens I've seen are around 800 watts.

 

11 minutes ago, WereCat said:

The biggest issue with saving power when using PC is that during low/idle loads the PC is the most inefficient and it's drawing an absurd amount of power for what is doing.

When I run a generic office desktop with a Haswell i7, integrated graphics, and a boot SSD through the Kill-a-Watt, it settles into an idle draw of around 35 watts.

 

My Kaby Lake laptop draws around 4, measured with the same meter.

 

Is it worth buying a brand new laptop just to save electricity? Probably not. That 31 watt difference would take 32 hours to save 1 kilowatt-hour. Assuming a $0.25/kwh electric rate, that works out to just over 23,000 hours of run time to save the price of this cheesy Chromebook from Best Buy. You'd break even sometime in June 2025, assuming you left the PC running 24/7 and will do the same with the Chromebook.

[Slave2school]

Your computer uses squat compared to an oven, dryer, hair dryer, water heater, furnace blower fan or any other resistive electrical load unless you are actively mining on it 24/7.  In Canada I saved roughly $30/month when my son left home for school with his gaming pc, (not much).  This might just be the world we live in right now.

[Djuntas]

21 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Those will be pointless. 

Your payment is a lot of fixed costs + some variable amount based on the amount of kWh consumed each month. 

You may have different cost based on how much kWh you consume each month... something like 0.02$ per kWh for the first 50kWh , 0.05$ per kWh for the next 200 kWh, 0.1$ for more than 250 kWh  ... of course, not dollars, but your local currency. 

 

A router will consume 1-2 watts an hour while it's working, so it would have to work 500 hours or 20 days to consume 1 kWh  ... so it basically consumes 0.1-0.2$ a month to keep it running. 

Your PC consumes less than 0.5w an hour while it's shut down and just plugged in the mains. It's the 5v stand-by which powers your motherboard and saves your CR2032 battery on your motherboard from discharging.  Unplug PC and in half a year to a year, you're gonna have to spend half a dollar (in your currency) to buy a CR2032 battery.

 

So what I'm trying to say is that even if you save a few kWh each month doing these tricks, you're STILL gonna be way above those thresholds where you pay a low amount for each kWh (for example if you consumed 150 kWh and now consume 145 kWh, you still pay a higher price for the 50 to 145 kWh range, if we go with the example above) , but your life will be so less fun. 

 

Get a power meter and measure things , doesn't have to be "kill-a-watt" brand, lots of other brands out there that do the same with reasonable accuracy.

 

Bro dont make me loose hope either xD...I live in Denmark so most of my bill, or large part of it, is also just taxes or whatever...But its beyound dumb now. Im used to paying 250-300 kroner a month on electricity, and right now Im set to use 1300 kwh a year, could be a bit less too my company said...

 

Honestly, what the fuck can poor shit stains like me do...Food is already about 1/3rd more than what I paid start of the year.

[mariushm]

May have been a bit too optimist about kWh prices when I said 0.02 , 0.05 .. should be around 10 times more, more in some countries where they have to use fuels to produce energy (ex islands like Greece) 

 

Just checked the prices here in Romania ... looks like we pay around 0.35$ per kWh (in local currency) but we have some laws that limit the price to lower thresholds, goes something like this

 

if the average power consumption of the house throughout 2021 was under 100kWh, the price is capped at 0.14$ per kWh  

if the average power consumption of the house throughout 2021 was under 300kWh, the price is capped at 0.16$ per kWh  

 

I'm paying around 40-50$ a month and I keep my pc running 24/7 (it idles somewhere below 60w, the system in description) 

[Djuntas]

1 minute ago, mariushm said:

Just checked the prices here in Romania ... looks like we pay around 0.35$ per kWh (in local currency) but we have some laws that limit the price to lower thresholds, goes something like this

 

if the average power consumption of the house throughout 2021 was under 100kWh, the price is capped at 0.14$ per kWh  

if the average power consumption of the house throughout 2021 was under 300kWh, the price is capped at 0.16$ per kWh  

 

I'm paying around 40-50$ a month and I keep my pc running 24/7 (it idles somewhere below 60w, the system in description) 

yeah okay...Id love to pay that. Some days in Denmark it peaked at 0.80 cents pr kwh.

[Slave2school]

6 minutes ago, Djuntas said:

Bro dont make me loose hope either xD...I live in Denmark so most of my bill, or large part of it, is also just taxes or whatever...But its beyound dumb now. Im used to paying 250-300 kroner a month on electricity, and right now Im set to use 1300 kwh a year, could be a bit less too my company said...

 

Honestly, what the fuck can poor shit stains like me do...Food is already about 1/3rd more than what I paid start of the year.

I use 1300kwh/month!

[mariushm]

Well, Statista says the average wholesale price of electricity was 336.76 euro per megawatt  or 0.336 eur per kWh .. add the taxes and you could be there : 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1271525/denmark-monthly-wholesale-electricity-price/

 

Quote

The average wholesale electricity price in Denmark stood at 336.76 euros per megawatt hour in September 2022, more than double the price recorded a year earlier. This was also the second highest figure of the indicated period. Since 2021, electricity prices in Europe soared, the result of a number of factors, including increased heating demand due to cold winters, a rise in natural gas and coal prices, and a drop in wind power generation due to low wind speeds. The energy supply shortage was further aggravated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

 

[Djuntas]

5 minutes ago, Slave2school said:

I use 1300kwh/month!

Nice xD Hope you dont live in a welfare country then. My gut what do we need the big state for, when these taxes and shit are making it impossible to live anyway. And who knows if it continues...Nobody can predict jack shit...You'd have bigger chances at crypto or stocks, than knowing how the world is in 1 year...

[Slave2school]

1 minute ago, Djuntas said:

Nice xD Hope you dont live in a welfare country then. My gut what do we need the big state for, when these taxes and shit are making it impossible to live anyway. And who knows if it continues...Nobody can predict jack shit...You'd have bigger chances at crypto or stocks, than knowing how the world is in 1 year...

I like roads, healthcare, and infrastructure so I don't mind "taxes". Canada eh! Taxes pay my pension lol!

[Djuntas]

7 minutes ago, Slave2school said:

I like roads, healthcare, and infrastructure so I don't mind "taxes". Canada eh! Taxes pay my pension lol!

Yes, but I think the taxes has to go down now on electricity in Denmark. Man if this continues to the next year...I was sort of planning on closing my eyes, crying, and buying a new PC when AMD 3D vcache CPUs comes out and shits on intel...So kinda like a spring og summer build, but...Yeah okay. My system is running since 2015, and cyper punk, elden ring, god of war and similar games I want to play can wait...

[ewitte]

I can't see it saving much.  Idle will be nearly identical.  Load even cutting down 100 (you won't on a 970) watts and gaming 10h a day is only 1kw a day.  That is about 15 cents a day here.  I save way more energy setting it to sleep when I'm not using it.  Not that I need to save I used 5kw the other day (AC is broken and temps were good) and generated 43kw with solar.