Can PC's download while in sleep mode?

VagabondWraith · November 24, 2016

I've wondered this. I have a bunch of games I would like to download overnight without leaving the PC fully on. Is it possible for a desktop PC?

The PS4/Xbone is able to download in standby, so that got me thinking... why not PC's?

Electronics Wizardy · November 24, 2016

no, but the idle power just kepps going down, and some new pcs dont sleep, they just go into a low power state and turn off the screen.

Oshino Shinobu · November 24, 2016

Mostly because PC (or at least Windows) sleep mode shuts down pretty much everything other than RAM and USB ports (there's obviously other parts that are still running, but those two are very important). Downclocking the CPU and GPU would do something similar to a standby mode, which basically puts everything into low power mode, unlike sleep mode, which actually shuts down a lot of the system.

mariushm · November 24, 2016

No, it can't, because hard drives are powered off and everything goes to sleep, just the memory sticks remain powered to keep the data in ram refreshed. In deeper sleep modes (hybernation for example) even the ram contents is dumped to hard drive and the ram is no longer refreshed.

PS4/ Xbones don't actually download in stand-by... well, actually what they mean by stand-by is not the same stand-by computers have. In stand-by Xbox one from what I see on various sites uses 92 watts. Computers in stand-by hover at something like 10-25 watts... in hybernation, they barely use any watts.

Most modern computers adjust the frequency of cpu cores down when they're not used, so the power consumption drops a lot. Video cards also have very low power consumptions when idle, in windows.. talking about 5-10 watts. Also, you can configure your computer to turn off things that aren't actively used, like for example turn off hard disks that aren't used after 10-15 minutes of no access.

So it's quite possible for a computer downloading a file over night accessing just one hard disk, to use as little as 25-30 watts depending on what processor you have.