Why does no one account the power bill when building a pc?

[TheAceHunter]

How come it seems like no one nowadays accounts for the power bill when building a pc, especially high end ones. Yes, I know Linus just did a video and accounted for that but that was my first time seeing someone else accounting for power. Hell, did people even account for power bills before?

 

[Princess Luna]

I don't really care about power bills, electricity is fairly cheap in Brazil and I am the kind of person who wishes the hardware to suck as much power as it needs from the wall to work on its prime than any "saving".

[ProjectBox153]

A lot of machines are very efficient these days. The reason that build had power taken into account is because the software will cause sustained maximum usage of the hardware, which causes very high power usage. 

[TheAceHunter]

I'd imagine where electricity is cheap, it wouldn't as big of a concern, but say you had balls to the wall rig for whatever purpose, wouldn't the bill generally, be more than a bit of pocket change? Or am I just overthinking this completely? 

[Volbet]

In the overall power bill my PC is a negligible part. 

Stuff like a drier, freezer and electrical heating sucks up a much bigger chunk, so if I was going to start saving on power I would start with those.

Power is also not that expensive where I live, so it's rarely a concern.

 

A lot of the people that inhabits this forum are also rather young, meaning that the probably don't pay their own power bill. 

[TheAceHunter]

Eh, I'd still account for it anyways, money is tight and would prefer to save a bit of money where I can but I can sorta see why people don't account for it much

 

[seon123]

The same reason we don't account for taxes in the US. They vary by location. Also, it depends on what time of day you will use the PC, and how much you will use it

[TheAceHunter]

True, most of the time, pc users are likely to only have one machine/pc for it but sometimes there are people who can't really use there computer that often or stuff like that and have the mic in the crowd I guess. Or maybe I haven't looking hard enough.

[Koneinuri]

Because I live near a dam

[TheAceHunter]

I guess you could say...

you live near a damn dam

I'll go now...

[Lathlaer]

Because if you are on a budget, your PC usually tends to reflect that and barring some weird anomalies, with cheaper parts and less powerful CPU's/GPU's, the power kind of takes care of itself (meaning, your PC is not a monster = your bills are not that big).

 

If you make a HEDT platform with SLI, your bill is much higher but you tend not to care that much anyway.

 

You don't go to car forums and ask why someone spending 200k for a car doesn't factor the fuel consumption, right? ;-)

[Tcrumpen]

17 minutes ago, TheAceHunter said:

How come it seems like no one nowadays accounts for the power bill when building a pc, especially high end ones. Yes, I know Linus just did a video and accounted for that but that was my first time seeing someone else accounting for power. Hell, did people even account for power bills before?

 

Most people building machines probably don't own their own property therefore they don't factor the electricity drain into it. Gaming for the most part has the majority of it's demographic in the "Still living with parents" section. Doesn't mean that people who own their own place can't be gamers to; i myself am one and i have my own flat

[Rolling Potatoe]

Even if one GPU might draw 100w more or something, most of the time

the pc will be idle or shut down/in sleepmode.

 

If you game for 2 hours every single day and one setup draws 100w more for the same performance (pretty unrealistic, maybe a 1070 compared to a 980 ti)

youll have use 0.2 kwh per day more, 73 kwh per year. The average power cost in the USA is 12 cents per kwh, so a difference of 8,76$ per year.

If you live in Europe and pay 0.25 Euro per kwh and run your pc at full load alot then it might be a concern.

[Coaxialgamer]

For the most part, we do. But components have gotten so much more efficient these days that it's no longer much of an issue. 

[Geekie]

Because in Norway power is really cheap (If you saw LTT's mining video power prices here are half of what they pay).

[porina]

How much power do you think your PC uses? In idle conditions you're probably looking at well under 100W for a higher end system. Worst case is probably gaming, with a single high end CPU and upper mainstream processor, assuming lightly overclocked, we're probably not going much beyond 300W, a bit more if you furmark+prime95 at same time. So just for illustration let's say you game on average for 2 hours a day, and 4 hours for other things (mostly idle). That would take 1 kWh. If you do that every day for a year, 365 kWh. At my current costs that works out less than the cost of a AAA game release, or roughly comparable to 4GB of basic ram.

[Arika]

simple. Because if the power it uses is going to cost you enough that you need to factor it into your budget when building a PC, then you cannot afford a computer

[porina]

Random thought: there is one scenario where running costs can be significant, that is for systems that are expected to run under load continuously. Many of my systems are built for distributed computing, and I try to balance compute performance per watt to up front cost. Do you pay more for more efficient parts, or go for less efficiency at lower initial cost, paying more electricity in the longer term. Miners also go through a similar optimisation. In my house, excessive heat buildup is my limiting factor.

[KuJoe]

I do. Am I no one?

[TidaLWaveZ]

1 hour ago, Koneinuri said:

Because I live near a dam

 

1 hour ago, TheAceHunter said:

I guess you could say...

you live near a damn dam

I'll go now...

 

but is it a god dam?

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Electricity prices like this was one factor that made me go for the GTX 1060 (3GB) over the RX 480.  (The 580 wasn't out yet at the time.)

 

I'm also considering building a NAS.  Was thinking of like dual or quad LGA 771 or 1366 or AMD contemporaries with standard (but cheap) CPUs (for example Xeon E5620), but a power bill like that would make me strongly consider a single-socket system with a low-TDP CPU.  (But, I've only seen quad-socket boards support 256GB DDR2, which I might eventually need if I'm doing FreeNAS.  I've seen 8x8 - 64GB DDR2 on eBay < $70.  If I could get by on relatively little RAM, I might get an LGA 1151 board & pip my currently-not-in-use i3-6100 in it.)

 

 

Btw ... Okay now, I'd like to know: who here has HIGHER electricity rates than me / my parents?  I think quite a few's rates are about a third of ours, based on many sites assuming super low rates like 10¢/kWh or so when they do power cost calculations.

[MEC-777]

It has very little impact. With my gaming rig running near 100% (CPU and GPU) while mining 24/7 for the past several months, our energy bill has shown no difference. Mind you, it helps a bit to have efficient hardware. I just added a second dual Xeon machine (2 X5650's) mining now 24/7 as well, but they're only running a little over 50% usage, so I'm expecting only a very small increase. 

 

If you account for the fact that most people only game for a few hours per day, it's really a very minor difference. 

[Cameron_99]

I personally have my house on a partial solar set up in north texas, so its usually sunny. 

[mynameisjuan]

1 hour ago, Rolling Potatoe said:

so a difference of 8,76$ per year.

See people never take time to look at actual cost. Like 90% of the power bills is heat,air,water. Everything is moot when it comes to worrying about cost. 

[KuJoe]

8 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Btw ... Okay now, I'd like to know: who here has HIGHER electricity rates than me / my parents?  I think quite a few's rates are about a third of ours, based on many sites assuming super low rates like 10¢/kWh or so when they do power cost calculations.

I wish my power bill was that low.  I'm paying $0.13/kWh here.