I’m in the process of getting my Home Assistant environment up and running, and decided to run a test: it turns out that my gaming PC (custom 5800X3D/7900XTX build) uses more power just sitting idle, than both of my storage freezers combined.
Background: In addition to some other things, I bought two “Eightree” brand Zigbee-compatible plugs to see how they fare. One is monitoring the power usage of both freezers on a power strip (don’t worry, it’s a heavy duty strip meant for this), and the other is measuring the usage of my entire desktop setup (including monitors and the HA server itself, a Lenovo M710q).
After monitoring these for a couple days, I decided that I will shut off my PC unless I’m actively using it. It’s not a server, but it does have WOL capability, so if I absolutely need to get into it remotely, it won’t be an issue.
Pretty fascinating stuff, and now my wife is completely on board as well; she wants to put a plug on her iMac to see what it draws, as she uses it to hold her cross-stitch files and other things.
I discovered a similar issue. PC desk was using 8-9W when the PC was turned OFF! My power strip was taking a bit under 1W (the little light, old), two smart bulbs as well but I’ll allow those losses. An older Logitech speaker setup (2+1) was taking 6-7W, turned off! Crazy… and illegal if it were made today (in EU). So this is completely wasted energy in my opinion… started disconnecting the whole desk now.
For comparison, my home server is averaging 7-8W, turned on all the time:
I also learned that PC’s draw a lot of power lol. I used to sit on my PC all day, now I know how much it cost. Even the monitor turning off splits the power draw by half.
Chest freezers are exceptionally energy efficient. It’s not a very good comparison.
Ah, but only one is a chest freezer 😉
That, and I used to have a freezer that was a power suck.
I also found out something interesting. My desktop uses about 1/3 of the power one of my freezers do. :)
That’s either a really efficient PC or a really old freezer 😂
The PC is effecient. It’s not a gaming PC. It idles at around 16W and maxes out at 80’ish.
Couple of thoughts:
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That smart plug may not be rated to the max wattage when GPU and CPU are at full blast. Be careful, because that could be an expensive mistake. Place a surge protector between the smart plug and the PC to be safe. Also run the PC full tilt for a while and make sure the smart plug doesnt get warm. If it does, fores have been known to start from those.
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Sounds like you know this with WoL, but suspend is your friend 😉 If the gaming PC is linux and you run into suspend issues, let me know, I’ve seen 'em all.
Place a surge protector between the smart plug and the PC to be safe.
What benefit does this serve in this situation?
how do you deal with kb+trackpad not working after wake?
The plugs are rated for 1800W each. Should be fine. I hit 670W a bit earlier, running Furmark VK and Cinebench R23 multi-core simultaneously for shits and giggles.
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My desktop PC idles quite high as well. The semi high-end consumer motherboards on the AMD side tend to use a lot of power at idle, so I think that’s a big part of it (at least the x570 series, can’t speak for later). And as others have said, high refresh rate and multiple monitors can make things worse.
I’ll add though that people’s perception of how much power there system is using can be skewed by software based monitoring tools. People may think there system is using only 50W because that’s what software reports but it’s actually drawing a 100W at the wall.
I’m eyeballing HWINFO64 right now, it’s saying my GPU is idling at ~28W and the CPU is idling at ~36W. Add a couple watts for the fans, various peripherals, and waste heat; it’s close to what I saw earlier.
The dual 1080p monitors eat up about 30W apiece on their own, when powered and actively displaying something. Barely a watt or two each when in standby mode.
My X670E system also uses a shitload of power. Literally 150w at idle, no matter what I do. Tried disabling every unnecessary feature in the BIOS and enabling all the energy efficient settings I can find, to no avail. Drives me nuts.
Those storage freezers are doing nothing the vast majority of the time. Not really a fair comparison.
Yeah, I noticed haha. Though I did have a big freezer some years ago that was a pretty hefty power suck… I never measured it, but it definitely affected my power bill.
It has never occured to me my whole life to not suspend or shut down computers overnight. It wakes up in like 2 seconds why wouldnt you, even if it used only an extra 1W
The problem I have with this I put the PC to sleep overnight every night - and like clockwork, Windows wakes it back up sometime overnight to do… Something.
I’ve been diagnosing the issue for years - checking wake timers, switching hardware devices permissions to wake the system off. I might fix it for a few months and then a new Windows update comes along and it’s back to its usual routine of waking itself.
Looking forward to seeing if it persists with Linux when I move at the end of support period for Win10 later this year.
Looking forward to seeing if it persists with Linux
I have never had what you described happen in my past 15 years of using linux, i hope you find your way around things, linux is dope once you get used to it.
My PC goes down from 70W idle to 2W when suspended. I also have a master slave power strip, that turns of all my peripherals (speakers, lights, audio interface, etc) when the PC drops below 10W so that saves some extra energy.
It has never occured to me my whole life to not suspend
Reliability issues with suspend-to-ram are rather common. Shutting down is an option, but session save and restore is a relatively recent thing and not supported by all desktop environments. I.e. it’s the post startup part that takes the longest.
You must be pretty young, because back in the dark days of spinning HDDs a computer would take 5+ minutes to boot.
Suspend != boot
Even in 2010 or earlier waking a pc from suspend would have only taken 2-3 seconds because the whole system state is in RAM not on disk.
Those were different times.
They are not relevant anymore with current self hosting setups.
TBH I didn’t think it used a whole lot at idle, what with modern manufacturing processes and all. I was fairly surprised.
If I’m reading that correctly, that shows the system is drawing around 100W just sitting idle.
Something is not right there.
Either the power meter is way out of calibration, or there is a configuration issue with your PC. Maybe you have a performance setting that is causing the CPU and GPU to not idle down ever? Or a rogue antivirus software that is cranking the CPU constantly?
Are there any spinning disk hard drives in your PC? They can sometimes use around 5W each on idle. That was the biggest cause of idle power consumption on my old xeon server, with 8 HDDs.
PSU choice can also affect it. Eg, if you buy into marketing and buy a monster 850W PSU, but it’s idle all the time and only uses 450W under load, then the PSU is spending the whole time outside it’s efficiency curve, and can end up causing more power draw than expected.
That’s nothing; my Ryzen 7000 machine uses 150w at idle. Modern high-end desktops draw a lot of power.
It’s ~90W at idle; the plug is monitoring everything at my desk. No spinning rust, all solid state. Settings for CPU and GPU are all default at the moment. It does have an 850W PSU, but I’ve had it pulling over 700W at one point (dimming my bedroom lights), so that’s somewhat justified 😅
I’ll dig into settings later, but for now I’m good just turning it off unless I’m using it.
(dimming my bedroom lights)
Thats terrifying. Your desk outlet should not share a circuit with your bedroom lighting circuit, that makes no sense (unless you’re talking about a desk lamp).
And regardless, if a 700W load can make your lights dim, then there’s a major wiring issue in your house. Don’t plug in an electric cooker, kettle, or space heater until you get that checked out.
The bedrooms, including my entire master bedroom suite, each have one 15A circuit. No more. That’s how most duplex townhouses are. The lights are currently those damn CFL lights, so they aren’t exactly difficult to dim - CFLs almost do it on their own when they’re close to dying (which these ones are).
That, and it’s a rental house.
Maybe he meant the act of dimming his lights trough Home Assistant?
Yeah, energy monitoring ruined several things for me. Can’t let my PC idle anymore, can only turn on the dishwasher when the sun is shining, need to explain regularly to my wife, why our home network and server infrastructure consume 130 Watts per hour, have to automate all plugs with standby devices connected…
The damn freezer consumes only 400 Watts per day while Network infrastructure, server, Wallpanels and KNX consume 3 Kilowatts, I wish I would have never learned this.
There is a reason people opt for old desktop CPUs and SSD’s
Part of why I’m going with the ‘T’ variant of the Pentium G4560 on my custom NAS build.
I’ve got a decent handle on my electric bill. I already have it set to “equal pay”, so I pay roughly the same amount every month - which includes my server cluster running 24/7.
I did some quick math, and my PC’s estimated usage for a month is ~70 kW/h, which is ~$10 in my area. My last power bill was 1,145 kW/h total.
70 kW is 16€ where I live and I have around 4000 kW per year.
Nice!
What kind of freezers are they? I hear that top loading freezers are quite efficient because the cool doesn’t escape when it gets opened like a front loading one.
That’s true; once everything inside is brought down to temp, they use very little power to stay cold.
My regular fridge uses ~500-800wh a day (depending on how much it got opened). My chest freezer though, uses ~200wh/day pretty consistently.
One is a smaller chest freezer, about 3 feet tall, probably 6 or 7 cubic feet if I had to guess. The other is a Hamilton Beach upright freezer from Costco. Both are full, so that helps with keeping them cold.
Both are full so it reduces the amount of cold air that can escape when you open them.
Without space between the contents, though, they freeze in phases and it affects how they come out. Watch our or just keep air gaps.
Is your upright the one with all the little compartments? That one looked to me like the most efficient upright design I’ve ever seen.
Yep, it’s awesome. We got it for $300 to supplement the smaller chest freezer, and it’s been an absolute godsend.
And why the old “ice boxes” are top load only. And why most boat fridges/freezers are top-load, because energy is scares/finite when disconnected from power.
Evaporative clay-pot coolers are also top-load for efficiency.
Any time I clear out the chest freezer to defrost or get to something at the bottom, the lower half stays below freezing for quite a while. Love that little freezer.
Have you considered putting your gaming pc in one of the storage freezers? /s
Perfect, I don’t need to run the fans anymore!
Seriously though - we have 5 kids, and feeding the little shits is expensive, so we freeze a lot of things for storage. I thought for certain the freezers would be power hogs compared to an idling PC, but I was very surprised to be proven wrong.
Next up… Measuring my server cluster 😬
Measuring my server cluster
Personally, I just don’t ask questions I don’t want the answer to.
Lat I checked, it was 40w idle for me on the kill-o-watt. Spinny rust and all!
I know they’re gonna be a power suck lol. Three mini PCs, a SFF PC, 4-bay hard drive docking station, 8-port switch, and a RPi0w… Hoping for a max of 200W, but I suppose we’ll see what happens 🫤
You might need to lower your expectations
Yeah… I know. 🙃
I see your 4-bay docking station and raise my 20-bay storage server. I even stopped counting how much the hardware costs for it :p
raise my 20-bay storage server.
I raise you my 72 bay monster… https://www.ebay.com/itm/126301431412
But I have 512 GB of ram in mine…
It’s attached via USB to a 2014-era Mac Mini running OMV; it’s a dedicated NAS and nothing else. Honestly not a huge fan of that hardware setup at this point, as the Proxmox cluster running all of my VMs and whatnot sees it drop out periodically for absolutely no reason. I’ve already tweaked the network adapter within the OS to stay powered on, because apparently Apple hardware has a mind of its own and just decides to shut various components off for “power saving” reasons.
The kicker is that I’m upgrading it to a 7th-gen based server soon. My dad gave me an old Pentium 4-powered HP Proliant DL110 last year, the case of which has 10x 3.5" drive bays, and is fully ATX compatible, so I’m gonna drop in a 7th gen mobo with Pentium G4560T (already have that on my desk), a newer PSU, and an HBA card. Don’t need a ton of processing power for a dedicated NAS running OMV - just a lot of expansion capacity.
Speak for yourself…
Super, go on dear…
Have you considered putting your children in one of the storage freezers? /s
👀
This gave me a serious chuckle… BC I deff considered it. Or keeping the box on balcony in the winter to get few more fps back in the day
A fridge can create a fairly low overall temp, but with something like a PC generating a ton of heat inside, it can’t keep up. The fridge just can’t move the heat fast enough and becomes an insulated box trapping the heat instead.
Yeah, man, getting into Home Assistant and messing with energy monitoring did more than thousands of chastising TV segments to get me to fully shut down my computers.
Who gives a crap about gaming use power consumption, give me idle benchmarks, you cowards. Do you even know how kWh work?
Plus PC that’s idling is just adding an attack surface IMHO
This tinfoil getting hella tight lately 🥲
How, if it’s not exposed to the internet? Burglars?
Is your gaming PC air gapped from the internet??
No. What kind of attack are you afraid of by idling a computer connected to your ISP router?
Any program on your PC that maintains or frequently initiates outbound connections, other machines on your LAN spreading an infection, literally any Trojan, etc. Double that if you haven’t disabled UPnP on your ISP router which is probably on by default.
If you are afraid of your PC infecting itself by background outbound connections, you should not turn it on at all. Running 24h vs 6h a day barely makes a difference in this regard - yes, there are fewer “random internet noise attacks” in less hours, but if your LAN is that dangerous, the computer should not be on for 5 minutes. Either you trust your LAN enough to have a computer running, or not.
Double that if you haven’t disabled UPnP on your ISP router which is probably on by default.
Talking about the sane defaults I mentioned earlier - my router has it off as a default. But if it wasn’t, my approach wouldn’t be to turn devices off¹ but change the router setting.
¹ I actually do turn off/plane mode all my non-server devices when I’m not using them but not for that reason.
You’re totally right, not turning it on at all would be safer. But we do need to use them so it makes sense to turn it on while in use. Security is only good up to the point of it making your machine unusable. Most of the attacks you see on running computers by happens overnight anyway, or otherwise when your machine is sitting idle not in use. Plus it gives you the opportunity to witness odd behavior if it were to happen while you’re using it.
And no, you should never trust your LAN in the year of our lord 2025. We are well beyond that in the cybersecurity landscape and have been for 10+ years. Zero Trust is the name of the game. If a device is on, and connected to the internet, it’s a target, as are any other devices on that network. Pretend that is not the case at
Do you really trust your consumer grade router and firewall on the desktop?
Against random internet noise? Yes, absolutely
OK but what if you have a lava lamp that is synced to the moods of a sarcastic and greedy AI?
Security is about to get really weird. It used to be the Internet of Things we had to worry about, but now we have Things in Internet.
wtf is that 😄
But I agree, random hardware in your LAN is more of a security threat than anything coming from outside in many cases.
What about something more spooky?
Most ISP routers have sane default settings and block all incoming traffic, you don’t even reach their log in interface. If they are somewhat updated you’ll be fine in most cases.
Yeah. I got a pro managing it.
I love my old desktops that pull almost nothing.
Do you have a link to the plugs? I want to try the same
Sure!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQTFM1T6
Just plug it in, hold the button to put it into pairing mode, then launch your zigbee discovery method. No app, no wifi, no bluetooth. Just pure local control.
monitors
Don’t underestimate the power draw of multiple monitors.
But while you’re at it: simply turn off different devices on the same power strip and check what actually draws how much.
The PC itself was drawing ~90 watts. The current draw right now - dual 1080p monitors, HA server, a 5-port switch, and a couple other small things - is about 12 watts. Desk power measurement is the yellow line, freezers are the blue line.
A fun one to put in perspective how hideously power hungry modern desktop PCs are is that I have an old (ish) laptop running as a local Plex server that also has a LLM loaded in there and a few other docker bits and pieces and it just sits happily humming at 10W idle (which is as much as my TV draws when it’s turned off).
I’ve looked into building a small form factor PC to replace it at some point but all the spare parts I have lying around would draw as much idle as when that tiny thing is going full tilt and I just can’t justify it for something that just stays on waiting for me to feel like rewatching The Matrix or whatever.
Laptops are pretty good at that. I run a few 7th and 8th gen 35W mini PCs in my server cluster (i7-7700T/i7-8700T), so hopefully that helps.
Yeah, I guess that’s how mini PCs got popular in the first place. Just cram a laptop in a box, get most of the performance and less of the hassle. At a premium, of course, so I imagine on the manufacturing side it’s quite the win/win.
Still, a 10x multiplier in power consumption at idle and over 5x under load is pretty wild.
Yeah for real. Cheap and plentiful on eBay as well. That’s where I get mine, and company surplus.
