How much electricity does a gaming computer use?

How much electricity does a gaming computer use depends on many factors like the configuration of the system, total gaming periods per day, etc? Most gamers are careless about the electricity cost that they have to pay per month for gaming purposes.

But some concerned gamers do. Because additional costs may vary from system to system. Suppose you are playing the famous game Call of duty, you are enjoying a lot but never thinking about the electricity cost that the game is consuming every moment.

So the common question always arises in gamers minds that how much electricity does a gaming computer use?

Most of us have no idea about this, not even any guess. If we think of those devices that consume the most electricity, then some common devices will come to our mind like a micro oven, washing machine, refrigerator, electric cooker, etc.

We never consider the computer within this. But we should know about this in detail.

It is pretty tough to calculate or estimate the actual consuming electricity of a gaming computer, but we can give you a basic idea.

In general, a gaming computer consumes an averagely of between 300 – 500 watts per hour during operation. Then it is calculated as up to 1400 kWh yearly which is six times higher than a laptop’s power usage.

This amount is equal to the power consumption of three refrigerators and six normal PC. If you have more high configurations and extra features, then the amount will be bigger.

However, these amounts may vary, depending on the gaming PC features, such as the installed hardware, software, and usage frequency. 

You should not stop gaming by hearing all of these calculations, keep gaming as before, but you should have a detailed idea about this.

At first, we will give you an idea of the power consumption of a gaming PC per hour. Let’s talk about that.

How much electricity does a gaming Computer use per hour?

There is a huge difference between a normal PC and a gaming PC’s electricity cost. So, the typical PC electric bill and gaming PC electric bill are fully different.

Gaming PC power consumption is more and higher than a typical PC. The consumption amount of electricity of a typical PC depends on many factors.

It depends on installed hardware, installed software, the amount of use, and the using purpose. 

Suppose, a PC is used for mining cryptocurrency, so it is always on and consuming so much energy. On the other hand, a PC is opened once a day to check email and internet browsing. The electricity bill will be completely different between these two computers. 

Now, consider a PC with a 10TB hard disk drive (HDD) which consumes almost four times more energy than a computer with the same configuration that uses a solid-state drive (SSD). So it varies on the install hardware also.

Another example is RAM, for which the electricity use may vary. Bigger RAM, higher cores, an integrated video card, etc. can reduce the power that your PC uses.

Gaming is the most important thing that consumes more power. Gaming PC needs high configuration hardware, heavy software than a typical PC. So, a gaming PC needs more energy and power to operate.

By keeping that in mind, we can give you an estimation that a gaming PC needs 300 to 500 watts per hour. It may increase up to 600 watts during playing VR games.

So, we can say from the experience that the average consumption is 300 watts per hour for the normal gaming session.

If you just browse or simply watch YouTube videos, then the power consumption will be 70 watts to 85 watts. 

Different PC parts use a different amount of power

Different PC is manufactured for different target users. It depends on the requirements and performances you need.

If you are using a gaming PC with multiple GPUs with other high configuration hardware, then your computer must consume more power.

Here we will give you an idea of which parts of your computer are consuming the most power. 

The Central Processing Unit (CPU) needs 55-150 watts. The Graphic card or GPU consumes 25-350 watts as required.

HHD needs more power than SSD. A hard disk drive needs .7-9 watts, on the other hand, a Solid-state drive needs .6-3 watts only.

RAM uses 2-5.5 watts and the optical drive needs 15-27 watts as well. The motherboard and power supply unit is the most important part of the computer system. They draw power and pass it to the rest of the parts.

The motherboard needs 25-100 watts and the Power supply unit requires 130-600 watts. All are here just an estimation from where you can at least assume which parts are using the most power of your system. 

Why your gaming PC is using more electricity than expected? 

If your computer consumes more power than expected, then there must be some reasons behind that.

In some cases, the electricity usage becomes higher than our above estimation. Now we are going to discuss some reasons for those cases.

Expired technology

If the technology went outdated or becomes backdated or expired, then there will be more power consumption happen. Suppose you are using a CRT monitor, which is connected with high power full gaming components and console, then the CRT monitor will consume more power and carry more electric bills. We know that the CRT monitor consumes more power than today’s LCD and LED monitor. 

Low-quality parts

Sometimes manufacturers use very poor quality parts inside the PC which causes high power consumption too. For example, if they use low-quality thermal paste which is so important part of the CPU, then the CPU will get heat all the time and consume more power than expected. Because, as time goes, it will degrade and the heat transfer rate will fall. The performance will go bad too.

Game quality 

Power consumption depends on your game quality also. Different games caries different internal instructions which require a different amount of electricity. For example, if you are playing Rocket League which consumes 120 watts per hour in your system. Hunt showdown is another game that needs more power to play and consumes more energy (330 watts).

If you play game using gameloop then It will overheat the CPU, that will increase the power consumption.

Dust

Dust is the big enemy of your gaming computer system. When it attacks the heat sink, it becomes worse and gets overheated. The cooling fan jammed out and get slow which requires more energy and more power to spin. So, you should clean your PC regularly.

How will you know the power consumption of your gaming computer?

It is so hard to calculate the actual amount of your gaming PC power consumption. To assume the amount you have to explain all about your PC.

More information will give you a more accurate result. Online consultants and online calculators can help also. Another way is to use a power meter to check your PC power consumption.

To do this, at first take a meter and then plug it into the wall outlet. After that plug it with the computer. This can give you the accurate result of power consumption of your PC when it runs and is idle.

So, here we got three ways to know the power consumption of your PC. Online consultant, online calculator, and power meter. 

Thermal Design Power

If you know the term first time, then you must be thinking about what is this TDP or Thermal Design Power. The PC manufacturers put this thing simply on the CPU and other computer components to measure power usage.

This is a good guess of power usage, but we should keep in mind that the TDP gauge depends on the maximum heat when the real applications are used. 

Now some questions may arise in our mind, what do I mean by real application? How can I know that the real applications are currently included with TDP?

These questions are the shortcomings of the TDP. Those are the reasons why TDP is not the best way to define the amount of power consumption of my gaming computer.

This can only help you to give an idea about the gaming PC power consumption. This is all about TDP to measure the energy that your PC use.

Conclusion

Gaming computer always has the advanced versions of hardware and latest software. Sometimes many additional components are there for the comfort of the gamer.

So the power consumption of a gaming PC is always higher than a typical computer. The high-end build PC consumes more energy per hour.

Initially, we always avoid the cost of power consumption of a gaming PC per day or hour, because it is so small in amount, but if you think the amount per year, then you will be concerned about the matter for sure.

In this article, we have known already all possible ways of measuring the power consumption of gaming PC and the reasons why it consumes more power than expected.

So, we all should be aware of this and think about the reduction process of excess power consumption to save energy costs.