Hi, so I was talking to my family about the two gaming systems in our house - my 8600K + GTX 1060 PC & my brother's Ryzen 2200G PC - and I made a point: and so my mum was convinced the electricity bill would be minimally affected by the power consumption of my PC. My brother's PC comes into the equation, I estimated his PC uses around 130W at max and he uses his PC easily 15 hours a day (it's complicated) and I also claimed this wouldn't affect the electricity bill that much. How much of an effect does my PC's electricity usage have on the household electricity bill? Our average electric bill comes to £50 per calendar month, but I have no idea if that covered my PC since I made my PC in June and the bill probably wouldn't have adjusted to the new PC's electricity usage due to it being a quarterly payment. Some notes: • My PC is used around 6 hours per day, 50% gaming, 50% desktop • Brother's PC is used around 12 hours per day, 90% gaming, 10% desktop (I'm not joking, he's got social problems and thus is homebound by choice) Both of the PCs are in my signature. Extra question, how much of a price difference is running 4.6GHz vs 4.9GHz on my 8600K?

Electricity Usage & Bills Question

By jiyeon
October 7, 2018 in Power Supplies

https://linustechtips.com/topic/980370-electricity-usage-bills-question/

Go to solution Solved by vanished, October 7, 2018

19 minutes ago, seoz said:

Interesting one, thanks guys.

It was an example that came up in my head, particularly since my brother wants to get a GTX 1050 in his PC soon.

At the end of the day, if we run the numbers I proposed, we get this:

You: (100 W / 0.80^[1]) x (0.3^[2] x 24 hours/day) x (30 days/month) x (0.12 $/kWh^[3]) x (0.001 kWh/Wh) = $3.24 per month

Brother: (70 W^[4] / 0.80^[5]) x (15 hours/day) x (30 days/month) x (0.12 $/kWh) x (0.001 kWh/Wh) = $4.73 per month

*1: this is the efficiency of your PSU at that load, from here: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/corsair-cx750m-psu,4799-5.html

*2: you said you use it 30% of the day, I'm assuming every day

*3: this is a total guess for your power cost. It could be much lower or much higher, you will have to figure that out.

*4: This is a guess at his power consumption. Again, get a kill-a-watt (or something better) to make sure

*5: This is a guess at his efficiency at that level from here (very rough as this isn't even the right model): https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/psu/101983-quiet-pure-power-10-600w/?page=5

Again, I must stress this is very rough, but provided you can at least fill in the true cost of your power, it should be accurate to within +/- 20% I'd say which is probably close enough. If you really wanted to be precise, you'd have to figure out how much of the time you spend off, at idle, and under load, and you'd have to factor in your monitor(s), etc. - here I'm just putting the whole system load through the PSU even though that's not quite fair^[6] but again, it's rough. Alternatively, as mentioned, just get a Kill-A-Watt. That will track your power over a long period of time and remove any need to do math. Just keep in mind that while they are the go-to, they can sometimes be quite inaccurate. I hope this can help

*6: what I estimated was wall power and thus shouldn't be done this way (divided by efficiency) but I'm estimating using idle figures, which is inherently going to underestimate the average monthly load, so I figure I can counter that somewhat by overestimating in this manner

Posted October 7, 2018

Author

2 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

It would be interesting to take a look next time you run a stress test. Increasing voltage increases the wattage, and the current, which also increases the wattage, so in theory that could make a ~38% increase to whatever it consumes at 1.15v - a number that surprised even me when I calculated it.

And that is the kind of statistic that would deter me from using too much power out of my PC. I'm yet to get solid numbers for my household electricity usage, but your above formula was a nice insight!

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