energy saving Gaming with low electricity bill

[Bouzoo]

4 minutes ago, _chuck1z said:

yep

What you can do is enable power saver mode and see how that works out. If game has no stuttering that is pretty much what you can do. Should save you some money. 

[Jack Longman]

48 minutes ago, _chuck1z said:

So, my pc consumes around 600 kwh each months. 

Specs:

6700k

1080 FE

Noctua NH-D14

Asus MX279H

 

Only plays Dota 2

more than 30 hours usage each months

 

How to reduce my bills?

You can afford to buy this PC but not the electricity. Either it's a load of bull or wherever you live the electricity prices are absolutely insanely high. If it's the latter see what electricity providers offer the lowest price

[TheAndroidSentByCyberlife]

9 minutes ago, Jack Longman said:

You can afford to buy this PC but not the electricity. Either it's a load of bull or wherever you live the electricity prices are absolutely insanely high. If it's the latter see what electricity providers offer the lowest price

It is probably a troll post

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, Jack Longman said:

You can afford to buy this PC but not the electricity. Either it's a load of bull or wherever you live the electricity prices are absolutely insanely high. If it's the latter see what electricity providers offer the lowest price

Same thing as people pay $400 for GPU but $20 for Windows. Or whine about high prices for AAA games.

[treeroy]

1 hour ago, _chuck1z said:

My whole household consumes around 1000+ kwh a month

Your PC is 60% of your electricity bill?

 

 

I agree with @Bouzoo, no offense but how can you have the money to throw away on £1000+ hardware that you say yourself you will never use, but complain about your electricity bill? Doesn't make any sense to me.

 

Have you tried options to limit your power? I.e. cap your framerate and your graphics card will do less work

[Bouzoo]

34 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Same thing as people pay $400 for GPU but $20 for Windows. Or whine about high prices for AAA games.

Or something like "I just bought an S7 Edge/iPhone 7 Plus, but I ain't gonna pay $3 for an app, no way".

[_chuck1z]

4 minutes ago, treeroy said:

Your PC is 60% of your electricity bill?

 

 

I agree with @Bouzoo, no offense but how can you have the money to throw away on £1000+ hardware that you say yourself you will never use, but complain about your electricity bill? Doesn't make any sense to me.

 

Have you tried options to limit your power? I.e. cap your framerate and your graphics card will do less work

already set dota 2 max framerate to 77

[mariushm]

Your video card uses up to around 180 watts in games, your processor will go up to around 60-80w in heavy loads, the motherboard and hard drive and everything else use maybe 40-50 watts.

So when you're gaming, you're probably averaging 250-300 watts, or 0.3 kWh for each hour you're playing.  For 30 hours of gaming a month, you're looking at less than 20 kWh.

When you're not gaming, when you're in Windows or browsing the 'net or watching Youtube, your system won't go over 100 watts , or 0.1 kWh for each hour of usage.

If you want to know how much your things consume, best thing would be to buy a kill-a-watt type of device which would tell you exactly how much power devices in your house use. Here's some examples (search for "electricity usage monitor" , "power monitor"  etc : http://amzn.to/2fDVJhL )

Some can also tell you the kWh value after some time elapses, which is especially useful if the computer or whatever you plug in does not use a constant amount of watts. For a constant amount of power used, you can just multiply that value with the time to get you kWh value (ex. if you see the consumption hovering at around 300w you can just use the 0.3 kWh value)

 

Had you played a lot  more hours each day (let's say 6-8 hours a day), it would make sense to investigate if it's worth changing your power supply to one with a higher efficiency. For example, if you have a 80+ bronze efficiency power supply that averages let's say 82% at 300w, that means your computer will use around 350 watts at the wall. With a 80+ gold efficiency power supply, that would maybe reach 92-94% efficiency at 300w, your computer would only use about 320 watts from the wall, so for each hour of gaming you'd save 30 watts.  This means you'll save 1kWh after 30 hours of gaming which is not a lot... but it's a good enough reason to upgrade by selling your old power supply and paying just for the difference to a 80% gold efficiency psu.

 

As for reducing power when gaming, you could reduce the video card's power consumption by playing with the power limits of the video card ajnd preventing it from going in "turbo". Drop the power limits to -5..10% and this will basically reduce the card's power consumption and will also reduce the maximum fps a bit

Another way to reduce the power consumption of the video card would be to enable vsync in games which limits output to 60 fps or whatever your monitor supports. Instead of producing 100-200 fps, with vsync the card will stay at 60fps and then do nothing for a lot of time, so it won't use as much power during those periods.

 

The 6700k is also overclockable, which means it can also be downclocked, to reduce its maximum frequencies for lower power consumption. Note though that you won't save much power, maybe 20w at most on average - the video card is the most power hungry component in your system.

 

 

[_chuck1z]

so, I think I use my computer way more than 30 hours a month (time sure went fast). Around 100 hours each month

[treeroy]

3 hours ago, _chuck1z said:

already set dota 2 max framerate to 77

You could try some serious underclocking. Underclock your CPU and GPU and they will go slower, do less work and use less power. With the hardware you have, it won't affect Dota 2.

[Mira Yurizaki]

If you want to lower your electric bills with your PC, then you're going to have to get lesser components that don't eat up as much power and you should leave your PC in Power Saver mode all the time. Also turn your monitor's brightness down to the minimum, in a 24"-27" monitor, there's a 50W difference between low and high. Otherwise as others have suggested, you're going to have to force your components to operate at a lower clock speed. Clock speed should have a 1:1 relationship with with respect to power consumption.

 

Otherwise, start looking at what else eats power in your home.

[Qwweb]

First off that is way overbuilt for what you are running, but there are some ways to knock down the power consumption. Switching to a 80+ gold or higher PSU would help a little ~20 Watts. Switching from a GTX1080 to a GTX 1050ti would save you around 100 Watts and switching from an i7 6700k to a i3 6320 would save ~40 Watts. This would save around 0.16 KWh per hour of gaming, or 4.8 KWh for 30 hours of gaming or 16 KWh for 100 hours of gaming. 

[Qwweb]

FYI with a Core i3 6320 and GTX 1050ti your usage (for 100 hours) would be around 200W or 20 KWh as opposed to aproximately (based on your build) 400W or 40 KWh

[mariushm]

9 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

If you want to lower your electric bills with your PC, then you're going to have to get lesser components that don't eat up as much power and you should leave your PC in Power Saver mode all the time. Also turn your monitor's brightness down to the minimum, in a 24"-27" monitor, there's a 50W difference between low and high. Otherwise as others have suggested, you're going to have to force your components to operate at a lower clock speed. Clock speed should have a 1:1 relationship with with respect to power consumption.

 

Otherwise, start looking at what else eats power in your home.

That's incorrect. Most 24-27" LCD monitors don't use more than 50 watts in total. On average, most will use around 30 watts. Adjusting the brightness will only vary power consumption by about 10-15 watts.

The panel itself (all those transistors flipping on and off becoming opaque or transparent creating pixels) probably uses 1-5 watts, the chip that decodes/decrypts the dvi/hdmi/displayport signals and processes image and converts it to lvds for the panel uses  less than 5w, the led backlight uses maybe 10-20 watts.... so in total you're looking at about 30 watts. Considering power supplies would have about 80-85% efficiency that means the monitor will draw about 35 watts from the wall.

 

I have two 24" monitors on my desk, but they're the older CFFL based lcd monitors. In total, they consume about 60 watts, and the brightness is set to around 50-70%.  LED backlight based monitors will use even less power.

 

Like I said, most power saving would be achieved by limiting the video card (set the power limit to a few percent less than default which would keep the card constantly downclocked a bit) , use msi afterburner if you want..

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

That's incorrect. Most 24-27" LCD monitors don't use more than 50 watts in total. On average, most will use around 30 watts. Adjusting the brightness will only vary power consumption by about 10-15 watts.

The panel itself (all those transistors flipping on and off becoming opaque or transparent creating pixels) probably uses 1-5 watts, the chip that decodes/decrypts the dvi/hdmi/displayport signals and processes image and converts it to lvds for the panel uses  less than 5w, the led backlight uses maybe 10-20 watts.... so in total you're looking at about 30 watts. Considering power supplies would have about 80-85% efficiency that means the monitor will draw about 35 watts from the wall.

 

I have two 24" monitors on my desk, but they're the older CFFL based lcd monitors. In total, they consume about 60 watts, and the brightness is set to around 50-70%.  LED backlight based monitors will use even less power.

 

Like I said, most power saving would be achieved by limiting the video card (set the power limit to a few percent less than default which would keep the card constantly downclocked a bit) , use msi afterburner if you want..

Welp, I probably didn't bother to take measurements after I got an LED panel.

 

Or the last thing I saw was a review for this: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/lg_38uc99.htm. Still, the power consumption between the lowest and the brightest setting is 40W

 

Still if you want to save pounds, shave ounces.

[alizaidi2000]

If you only play dota, then you should downgrade your specs because they take more power. You should get a more efficient  power supply. but don't fear higher wattage power supplies which happen to be more effecient. Your pc will only take the amount of power it needs. For example, if some dude builds a pc with a 750w psu, and it runs perfectly fine, there would be no point in buying a higher wattage psu, like a 1200w,(except for extra headroom) because it will still take equal to or less than 750w  

[mariushm]

31 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Welp, I probably didn't bother to take measurements after I got an LED panel.

 

Or the last thing I saw was a review for this: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/lg_38uc99.htm. Still, the power consumption between the lowest and the brightest setting is 40W

 

Still if you want to save pounds, shave ounces.

That's a 38" ultra-wide monitor and a curved one to top it off. Unlike regular 24-27" monitors which can be edge lit (strips of tiny leds at top and bottom behind several layers of materials that spread the light uniformly), such monitor is probably using a backlight similar to TVs where there's leds over the whole surface of the back panel. With curved displays, it's easier to keep the backlight consistent by placing leds all over the surface... it's much harder to edge light curved surfaces because those layers that spread light all over to make it uniform don't like to be bent.

On the same page you can see a beautiful graph :

 

 

As you can see, the 24-27" monitors in the picture are all almost all under 40 watts, and calibrated, they're all less than 30 watts. Adjusting the brightness won't do much of a difference, only a few watts.

[Sniperfox47]

I don't know why nobody is mentioning this, but there's plenty of other steps you can take to lower power, such as:

 

• Get overclocking tools and underclock your CPU and GPU.
• Then if you're on Windows switch to Power Saver mode in the control panel/settings menu, or if you're on Linux change your CPU governor to conservative mode.
• Go into bios and disable two of your CPU cores if you can. Or disable your dedicated GPU and play off your integrated GPU.
• Remove any extra hard drives other than your primary one.
• Set your fans up on slower speeds.
• Replace your power supply with a lower rated more efficient one that has an eco- or fanless mode.
• Cap your frame rate at a much lower limit and turn the graphics settings down as far as possible.
• If on Windows go into advanced system settings and turn off all "Windows graphical effects", or if on Linux switch to a lighter desktop environment like lxde.

[malon]

buy solarpannels

[SLAYR]

9 hours ago, _chuck1z said:

already set dota 2 max framerate to 77

If you only use it for dota. Take out the  gtx 1080, the igpu should be enough for that, and lock the framerate to 60 so that it doesn't waste power.

 

You don't want to underclock you want to underVOLT your cpu/gpu, make it run at lower voltages the frequency is irrelevant to the power consumption.

 

edit: if you computer uses 600KWh per month, and you use your computer for 100 hours a month that means your computer using 6,000W, explain?

even at full load it would be about 400W for that so 40KWh (0.4KW * 100 hours) is what it should draw at full load for the entire time.

[Qwweb]

20 minutes ago, SLAYR said:

You don't want to underclock you want to underVOLT your cpu/gpu, make it run at lower voltages the frequency is irrelevant to the power consumption.

Just make sure you don't go under 7.5 Volts because that is the saftey cutoff. Binary 1s are 5V and 0s are 2.5V, with current fluctuation at low voltages, your CPU can confuse 1s for 0s, which is a very bad thing. The only exception is if you have a build with ECC memory and cache like a server, but even then it is bad.

[SLAYR]

1 hour ago, Qwweb said:

Just make sure you don't go under 7.5 Volts because that is the saftey cutoff. Binary 1s are 5V and 0s are 2.5V, with current fluctuation at low voltages, your CPU can confuse 1s for 0s, which is a very bad thing. The only exception is if you have a build with ECC memory and cache like a server, but even then it is bad.

7.5V???

 

This has nothing to do with ecc memory errors.

 

cpu voltages are usually set between 0.5-2V and most run in between 0.7-1.5V, it you are running a 7.5V cpu or gpu voltage it will be fried to death. 

 

You need more voltage to push higher frequencies, so undervolting may cause instabilities at the stock speeds. Basically instabilities are the 0 and 1s to mixing up and the system will BSOD, crash, or freeze. Instabilities occur when you run too high of a frequency for a given voltage.

 

Underclocking is just the reverse of overclocking just follow the same directions backwards.

 

[Qwweb]

5 minutes ago, SLAYR said:

7.5V???

 

This has nothing to do with ecc memory errors.

 

cpu voltages are usually set between 0.5-2V and most run in between 0.7-1.5V, it you are running a 7.5V cpu or gpu voltage it will be fried to death. 

 

You need more voltage to push higher frequencies, so undervolting may cause instabilities at the stock speeds. Basically instabilities are the 0 and 1s to mixing up and the system will BSOD, crash, or freeze. Instabilities occur when you run too high of a frequency for a given voltage.

 

Underclocking is just the reverse of overclocking just follow the same directions backwards.

 

Sorry, I meant to say 0-0.33V (0) and 0.66V (1) for CMOS (NOT logic) I was thinking of TTL (NAND logic)

[thendawg]

Where on earth did you come up with 600kwh a month from?? I have a similar build, except 4770k and 980ti - both oc'd however, so prob even less efficient - and my entire office setup used around 600kwh last month. That includes a dual xeon server that runs 24x7 (and often sees 50+% cpu util), a dual xeon Mac Pro 3,1, my gaming dekstop, 3 monitors, and a decent bit of other network gear. The only way to really know what your system is drawing is to monitor it. Alot of the consumer UPS will show you power consumption so you can come up with a rough average. Im using a fairly large, enterprise grade UPS, which happens to show kwh usage in its web management - even breaks it down by day, week, month going back 90 days. A couple months back I worked prob 50% of the month from home and did quite a bit of gaming in my downtime and still think I only hit around 700kwh. 

 

But anyways, your system will only pull as much power as it needs. A CPU with 95w TDP means the CPU is designed to handle the heat dissipation of 95w - hence TDP of components has virtually no correlation with energy consumption. Only using 5% cpu? Youll prob see 15w or so of power draw by the CPU. P states can further reduce this by downclocking the proc during low loads. Your GPU does the exact same thing. Granted, if you went with the most efficient hw possible, you're going to see a decrease as the hw is designed to operate with even less power, but it likely wont be near as dramatic as you think. 

 

Id first try to get an accurate baseline of your power consumption using a UPS or Kill-a-watt, then go from there. But seriously - you have a $2000+ rig here - Im not sure what the usage rates are where you live, but at least around here, the difference you would see between the rig you have and the most energy efficient system possible is going to be MAYBE 20-30kwh/mo - and thats being super generous. Thats what, $5/mo at best? Find another way to save $5.

[mad dudy]

get server parts they should use less power.