Sleep vs Shut Down

[Snoogans2you]

Hi all,

 

I have recently finished putting together my first gaming rig, and am LOVING it. Since I work 8-5 daily, I only use the computer at night for gaming, mostly through GameStream on my Nvidia Shield. Because I'm not using the computer for the bulk of the day, I've been turning it completely off each night after use. However, if I buy a game during the work day because of a flash sale, etc, I'd like the ability to "wake" my PC up to begin downloads so they're ready to go when I get home. In order to do so I can use software to "Wake on Lan", but it appears that you need to leave your computer in Sleep mode as it won't wake from full shutdown. What would the risks or benefits be to leaving my PC in sleep mode to accomplish this? What do you all do?

[AlwaysFSX]

Sleep mode is perfectly fine, it's just a running low power state.

[Rorgash]

i heard something in the past about SSD's and hibernation being bad or something, this true?

[Liam-McShane]

Sleep mode will not affect your hardware. It will only cost more in terms of your power bill. I was surprised to find my PC consumed 66 watts in sleep mode but only around 5 when shut off.

[Enderman]

i heard something in the past about SSD's and hibernation being bad or something, this true?

hibernation wastes like 8GB of your SSD which sucks when SSDs are small and have limited space.

[Wano97]

Sleep mode will not affect your hardware. It will only cost more in terms of your power bill. I was surprised to find my PC consumed 66 watts in sleep mode but only around 5 when shut off.

Are you sure? My PC used 60-70 watts at 'idle' actually I was just browsing webpages.

[ViruZ_HUN]

Sleep mode is perfectly fine, it's just a running low power state.

Your signature. I know that taste! EW

[AlwaysFSX]

Your signature. I know that taste! EW

Oh.. now you make sense..

[ohJey]

i heard something in the past about SSD's and hibernation being bad or something, this true?

Yes it's "bad" because it writes all the RAM to a hibernation file on the SSD, which wastes write cycles

[Liam-McShane]

Are you sure? My PC used 60-70 watts at 'idle' actually I was just browsing webpages.

Yeah. Mine uses 77 when idling. I may have to re-check but that's what the meter said.

[CyanOG]

I log off and after like 20 minutes the pc goes to sleep on its own

[Sauron]

Only shut it down if you are leaving it unused for more than a day.

[pizzadave2]

I usually turn mine off when I go to bed.

[Horrorfull]

Sleep cause my LEDS make my room look cool.

[Speedbird]

Wake-on-LAN does power on your computer from cold, actually. It doesn't have to be sleeping.

[jmaster299]

Off, always off, never anything else. Any of the nonsense about shutting down a computer being "bad" or "harmful" to your system because of the "surge" when you turn it back on is just that, nonsense. All of that nonsense comes from long dead articles that were nothing buy lies to begin with and is left over habbit from the days when booting up a computer took several minutes.

But even with a HDD, a computer can boot up in about 60 seconds these days. Sleep and Hibernate modes were only created because people hated the super long boot times. With boot times being reasonable, and on the insanely fast side with SSDs, they serve no practical purpose any more. If you're not going to be using your computer, just turn it off.

Shutting the system down is the only thing that completely clears your cache. Even a restart does not clear it completely. And no matter how low the power usage is during Sleep Mode, it will never be as low as when you shut if down.

 

[Stefan Becker]

I always turn off my gaming rig, but I almost never turn off my laptop.

[STRMfrmXMN]

I use this wonderful thing called Hibernate on Windows 7 and 8.1. It's the best thing. Turns it off yet lets you resume where you were before like sleep does, just no password like Shut Down. I never Shut Down my computers anymore, just hibernate or sleep. Usually Hibernate as I swap hard drives a lot and can't do that when the computers asleep (well, I suppose I could but I don't wanna see the result of that) and find that my old-ish desktop isn't very power efficient and uses so much less electricity in Hibernate. On my laptop, if I'm gone for less than about 6 hours, I'll sleep while over that I'll Hibernate. If I'm worried about someone deciding that they want to snoop around my computer (laptop for school), then I'll shut it down all the way as my laptop has sh*t battery life and Hibernate doesn't require your password.

 

It's a lot less complicated than it sounds....

[FranBunnyFFXII]

Running 24/7 stable has the least impact on hardware.

 

Spin up and spin down do far more damage to PC hardware than sitting at idle for hundreds of hours.

 

Why do you think server hardware lasts forever.

[zombiepixel]

shut off is better but keeping the computer in sleep mode for a long time will affect the hardware in the long term. the motherboard is still running and the cpu is still hot(not as hot as the computer running). it wont affect it but it will eventually kill the cpu. but by then you wont need the computer cause its old

[jon.01]

...

[Guest Kloaked]

Running 24/7 stable has the least impact on hardware.

Spin up and spin down do far more damage to PC hardware than sitting at idle for hundreds of hours.

Why do you think server hardware lasts forever.

Because server hardware is made to run that long, lol.

[STRMfrmXMN]

Am I the only one who uses hibernate all the time? It's the best of both sleep and shut down. You resume from where you were but use less power and don't need to login again.

[STRMfrmXMN]

I use sleep if I'm gone for less than 4 hours usually.

[Opcode]

I'm use to my machine running 24/7 around the clock. Tho lately I have been letting it automatically go to sleep after 1-2 hours when I go to bed. Saves a bit on the power bill and no point in letting it run full throttle when you're not using it so... Letting it sleep would be the best bet.