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Hey TLers,
Three months ago I bought myself a nice new very high end computer, running on a 1000w PSU. I also got myself 3 24" monitors to go with it. This morning I received my electricity bill for the last 90 days, and it is almost double my bill of the last 90 days before that.
This increase is obviously due to the computer, so I was wondering if anyone out there knows much about computer power usage, and could talk me through how to cut this down dramatically?
I have been leaving it on all night, which obviously I am going to stop doing. How much power does sleep mode use? I understand it is very little, but does 8-10 hours of sleep everynight cost me enough that simply turning the computer off and then back on in the morning would help out much on my electricity bill?
Just looking for any tips really.
Thanks!
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United Kingdom20161 Posts
Sleep should use pretty much 0 power. What components are you using (cpu, gpu/s, PSU)? any overclocks?
Are you running anything like folding@home that will max out components 24/7?
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i7 4790k that is supposed to be overclocked to 4.6ghz, but I don't think it was. Is there any easy way to check?
GPU is a "KFA2 GeForce GTX 780 EX OC 3072MB PCI-Express Graphics Card "
16gb of Kingston 2400mhz ram.
250gb Samsung SSD
3tb hard drive.
And my PSU is a "Super Flower 80+ Gold 1000W PSU".
I have no idea what folding@home is so I guess not.
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United Kingdom20161 Posts
Grab something that loads CPU like cinebench r15, check cpu clock speeds, temperatures etc in hwinfo ( www.hwinfo.com )
Your CPU should be at 4600mhz under load, 800mhz on idle. You can go into bios and force enable c-states and EIST and you should probably do that if you didn't already - and also, set windows power plan to Balanced so that CPU power saving stuff can work.
In nvidia control panel you can set GPU power to adaptive instead of prefer maximum performance. If hwinfo does not tell you GPU clock speeds, gpu-z or MSI afterburner will - and you should be able to idle around ~135mhz? It's pretty obvious if it's not in the deepest idle state, cause it would be way higher (like 700-100mhz). That makes a big difference on idle power.
If done properly, idle power usage would be a small fraction of load power usage. If you're playing a game with GPU maxed and some CPU load, your full system power consumption might be around 400w from the wall. I don't know what your bills are or how much of an increase it is, what power costs etc in exact numbers to be able to say if it's a reasonable increase or not
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This is what I see
In terms of my bills, it went from roughly £400 over 197 days to £500 over 90 days. A massive increase.
Also I have set my computer to sleep after 15 minutes idle, but it doesn't seem to do it?
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United Kingdom20161 Posts
There's a sensors tab for hwinfo that shows way more information
i really don't even know basics about electricity rates etc, but i can't make those numbers add up at all. £300 extra in 90 days?
Even if it was drawing 500w from the wall 24/7 (which is an unreasonably high number even assuming all components at full load for some task), at 15p per kw hour, that's only ~£162 in those whole 90 days.. but your actual power consumption is probably only a small fraction of that. ~350w from the wall while gaming with gpu at full load, under 100w at idle etc (which is where it'd be probably >80% of the time)
I can't make that math work and it seems like a crazy price increase so i think it's best to wait for other people to reply and check other sources of power usage
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Don't forget there are other factors included that I have not mentioned. For example the old computer is now in my bedroom and I will often turn it on at night to watch things in bed and fall asleep, so for 8-10 hours of the day I have both computers running. There is also the addition of my flatmates computer (similar specs, triple screen) that has been on more often in the day than in the past. That is it, but it really seems like the main contribution would be the new computer.
Later on tonight I will dig out the bills and give exact numbers.
Also, any idea why the computer won't go to sleep when idle for 15 minutes? Seems like something must be tricking it into thinking it is not idle.
Thanks for the help by the way!
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Kill-a-watt is usually the standard but any such device would do fine. The thing about electricity bills in a lot of places is that they bill you on tiered pricing, with higher per-unit pricing once your consumption has reached a certain threshold, for example; he may only be using say 30% more power, but if the next tier of pricing is 50% more per kwh, then it would explain the price of the bill.
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On November 04 2014 21:53 Cyro wrote: There's a sensors tab for hwinfo that shows way more information
i really don't even know basics about electricity rates etc, but i can't make those numbers add up at all. £300 extra in 90 days?
Even if it was drawing 500w from the wall 24/7 (which is an unreasonably high number even assuming all components at full load for some task), at 15p per kw hour, that's only ~£162 in those whole 90 days.. but your actual power consumption is probably only a small fraction of that. ~350w from the wall while gaming with gpu at full load, under 100w at idle etc (which is where it'd be probably >80% of the time)
I can't make that math work and it seems like a crazy price increase so i think it's best to wait for other people to reply and check other sources of power usage Napkin math from me with 3 monitors at ~1kWh extra per day(somewhere around 10-15 hours), and the computer at ~5kWh extra puts the price of the power at ~50p/kwh, which if it's tiered power could potentially happen. In practice if you don't run at maximum brightness, and you aren't sitting at the computer putting stress on it it'll be a lot less, and I don't think many people would be able to put that much time into it anyways.
I'd look into other potential causes because while the computer does add some, I don't think you spend 10+ hours a day running stress tests on it.
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Ok for those of you interested in the bill, here are the numbers.
The previous bill was this. 197 days. Starting read was 68647, and the current estimate read was 71214. A total change of 2567 kWh at 14.28p per kWh + standing charge gives us a total of £402.03 for the 197 days.
The most recent bill is this.94 days. Starting read was estimate 71214, the current read was 74323. A total change of 3109 kWh at 14.28p per kWh + standing charge gives us a total of £460.89.
More than half the days, yet more electricity usage. So I guess it was either their original estimate was wrong (could they have gotten it THAT wrong?), or the addition of my new computer combined with the extra usage of my flatmates computer has seriously increased our electricity usage.
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United Kingdom20161 Posts
That's a huge amount of power, 3109kwh in ~90 days, if you assume you would have 1600 of that anyway it's still ~1500kwh in 90 days, 500kwh per month, ~16.5kwh per day. That's the kind of power draw you would only see from computers if you took two systems like yours, ran minor overclocks on them and then loaded CPU and graphics card to 100% and left them there 24/7
just check what your flatmate is doing with his system, if he has 2-3 high powered GPU's etc or is running anything to load stuff for very long periods of time, if you have other sources of power usage etc. A kill-a-watt is good
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On November 06 2014 02:45 Cyro wrote: That's a huge amount of power, 3109kwh in ~90 days, if you assume you would have 1600 of that anyway it's still ~1500kwh in 90 days, 500kwh per month, ~16.5kwh per day. That's the kind of power draw you would only see from computers if you took two systems like yours, ran minor overclocks on them and then loaded CPU and graphics card to 100% and left them there 24/7
just check what your flatmate is doing with his system, if he has 2-3 high powered GPU's etc or is running anything to load stuff for very long periods of time, if you have other sources of power usage etc. A kill-a-watt is good
My flatmate is running a similar system but on a 450w PSU, and he is out of the house work ours and then simply browses the web on evenings. The only other big thing using electricity is my upstairs computer, that is an i3 with a 460gtx on a 400w psu and is asleep when I am not playing sc2 or watching TV at night. That is pretty much all our electricity usage except lights, shower and TV (tv is rarely used). I actually just checked the bill from when we first moved in and we used 139kWh during a week. I did some quick over estimated math and put that at 1600kWh per 90 days. So somehow we are now using 1400kWh more with the addition of one new computer.
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1400 kWh more a month is pretty much 2000 W more on average (24/7). You couldn't even get close to making all three of those computers pull that much combined (yet alone net over previous usage) even if you were trying to by overclocking them all and running maximum stress tests 24/7. The bulk of the listed increase can't be the computer. There's an error somewhere or something else is using the extra energy like appliances, heating, etc.
whoops sorry, 1400 kWh over three months. Still is 650 W more on average, more than the computer in the OP can draw by itself.
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United Kingdom20161 Posts
Yea the math doesn't work
ty for tl+!
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But there really is nothing else being used, at least nothing that has changed, except heating, which is gas.
@Myrmidon the 1400kWh increase is over 3 m onths, so that is down to 400-500kWh increase per month.
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What about a neighbor stealing electricity? Google doesn't really help in answering how that would work exactly, but it seems it does happen (though seems like a strange idea to steal from a neighbor instead of just circumventing their own meter).
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On November 06 2014 06:12 Westy wrote: But there really is nothing else being used, at least nothing that has changed, except heating, which is gas.
@Myrmidon the 1400kWh increase is over 3 m onths, so that is down to 400-500kWh increase per month. Sorry, updated, still doesn't make sense unless your flatmate switched from light average usage to 24/7 Folding@Home or something. Or stolen electricity, a bad reading, etc.
You should probably call your utility company, ask your flatmate if anything's up, and get one of those relatively cheap power meters just to check on things.
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So just went out and checked the meter, The reading was 74552. Not only does this make their reading correct, this means that since their last reading, we have used 229kWh since the reading (8 days ago at most). The math puts this at about 858kWh monthly. Does that sound reasonable for a house with two guys, three computers, only one of which is on 24/7 and most of that time is idle or simply work?
Edit: Will be going away in a few hours for the weekend. I will be turning all my computers off and making another reading when I get back on Sunday.
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That seems completely ridiculous. This means there's an average load of 1200W going on in your home (if I understood how things have to be calculated). That can't be right?
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