How To Measure Your PC's Power Consumption

[neeyik]

Modern computers have components that require lots of power and given that this all costs money, here's our guide to measuring how much energy your PC uses.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/guides/2641-measuring-power-guide/

 

[DSirius]

Great topic which worth to investigate more. So thank you for this article.
A suggestion, which I think will be very helpful, is to report how much power your entire computer system draws for your work or gaming and make a poll.
My whole computer is using approximately 250W for usually tasks like browsing or office, and up to 620W when gaming - tested playing Cyberpunk 2077.
Will be interesting to test how much more power is needed when enabling Ray Tracing in games.
I measured only the computer, with a power meter, without monitors and or speakers.

So, chat, how much power your whole computer is using from the wall?

I bet that the champion of power consumption is a computer which has a 13900K and an RTX 4090, but we can find a lot of surprises here too.
I think that liquid cooling, especially custom liquid cooling will add more than we expect to total power consumption.

P.S.1
Unrequested tech tip: RGB lights consume almost half of the computer power, so a good idea to reduce power consumption is to turn off any RGB lights from MB, videocard, RAM, or fans.
P.S.2 - P.S.1 is a joke - offered by a famous "tech expert".

 

[Neatfeatguy]

Last time I used my Kill-a-Watt was when I was running a heavy 3.7 OC on my PII x4 940 with 2 GTX 570s pushed to the max volt and OC I could muster on them. I want to say I was pulling close to 700W at the wall while gaming.

I eventually moved to a i5-4670k and just ran it at stock, it walked all over the PII running at 3.7. The Kill-a-Watt with the 4670k and same GTX 570s was pulling around 540W while gaming.

Those readings were just the tower, monitor and speakers were not part of the readings.

I wonder what my 5900x and 3080Ti use....maybe one day when I'm not lazy I'll take a look.

 

[Achaios]

4770K - undervolted & OC'd.
Maximus VI Hero
GTX 1080 (Palit Game Rock) - undervolted & OC'd.
2 Samsung SATA SSD's
2 HDD's in Raid 1
6 fans
1 NOCTUA CPU fan & heatsink
CORSAIR RMi 650 Gold

Corsair's RMi 650 allows me to see power consumption in real time.

Max power consumption is abt 300W when I play something like Civ VI but most of the time it hovers between 65W and 200W when I play WoW Classic WOTLK at 3440X1440 100 FPS Ultra.

I don't rly play any modern games and I would definitely never play smt lime Cyberpunk or w/e.

I cross-checked with Killawatt and power readings are in the same ballpark. I would never, ever own a rig that draws like 700W from the wall, I consider that foolishness.

P.S.: Lowest power consumption when idle at the desktop is between 48 and 60W. I have got all my CPU's power saving features turned on when idling/browsing/working through ASUS AI Suite software.

 

[DSirius]

4770K - undervolted & OC'd.
Maximus VI Hero
GTX 1080 (Palit Game Rock) - undervolted & OC'd.
2 Samsung SATA SSD's
2 HDD's in Raid 1
6 fans
1 NOCTUA CPU fan & heatsink
CORSAIR RMi 650 Gold

Corsair's RMi 650 allows me to see power consumption in real time.

Max power consumption is abt 300W when I play something like Civ VI but most of the time it hovers between 65W and 200W when I play WoW Classic WOTLK at 3440X1440 100 FPS Ultra.

I don't rly play any modern games and I would definitely never play smt lime Cyberpunk or w/e.

I cross-checked with Killawatt and power readings are in the same ballpark. I would never, ever own a rig that draws like 700W from the wall, I consider that foolishness.

P.S.: Lowest power consumption when idle at the desktop is between 48 and 60W. I have got all my CPU's power saving features turned on when idling/browsing/working through ASUS AI Suite software.

Yep, good old days of computer's low power consumption are gone. Nowdays even a laptop is drawing more power, high end gaming laptops are close to 300W.

 

[poohbear]

Thank you for this very informative article!! It's timely for me because I upgraded to an RTX 3080 to go with my 13700KF 2 weeks ago and the transient power spikes of the 3080 would shut down my 9 year old 750wt Seasonic PSU whilst gaming. Upgraded to an ATX 3.0 1000w MEG 1000ai Platinum(which has the USB cable that plugs into the mobo to show total power) and the shut downs stopped completely. The new ATX 3.0 PSUs can handle transient spikes 3x the wattage of a GPU & 2x the wattage of a CPU. However, the PSU has really annoying coil whine when system is idle... so ordered the BeQuiet Dark Power 13 850w Titanium...hopefully it won't have coil whine!

Incidentally, the MSI software shows my 13700KF & 3080 consuming only 410w-450w total power...so 850w should be more than enough.

 

[Lew Zealand]

It's still possible to get pretty low idle and web browsing power consumption with recent components. My i7-9700 & RX 6600XT on B360 idles at 25W and rummages around the 30s when web browsing. I come from the NUC side of things where 7W idle is expected so this 25W is high power to me but I understand that it's about as low as can be expected on a gaming PC.

 

[Nintenboy01]

Hwmonitor had some sort of power supply readout, I have to check the exact name later

 

[m3tavision]

My UPS gives out readings.....

 

[Babbel13]

UPS battery backup power sources like the Cyberpower sinewave series will give you the power level on its display or software. This includes all the power being used by the computer. This is the best way because you get power backup too.

 

[toooooot]

PSU power usage screens are fairly common now too. Asus ROG PSUs have it.

 

[mountains]

UPS battery backup power sources like the Cyberpower sinewave series will give you the power level on its display or software. This includes all the power being used by the computer. This is the best way because you get power backup too.

Yes, and HWInfo64 can read and display that Cyberpower UPS info, too. Also, there are cool Rainmeter skins for HWInfo64.

 

[Ben Myers]

An inexpensive Kill-a-Watt, inserted between the power cord and the wall-or-UPS outlet, gives a comprehensive reading of power consumption of the entire computer in real time. Isn't that really what we want to see?

 

[geogan]

You forgot to mention having two or three monitors plugged in and on also adds a lot...about 90W in my case for three.

Also the network devices adds more... about 50W for me.

With all on and just in Windows here typing it is using about 260-270W at the socket (using a power meter on main plug which all devices branch off of on power strips) - for a 5950X (no overclock Eco mode), X570 Hero VIII and Gigabyte 4080 (stock) with 32GB @ 3200MHz

Also this is running Windows in "Power Saver" plan mode.. and also AMD have added a new "Eco-Mode" button to Ryzen Master which I have turned on (no idea what it does)

I am basically trying to run my machine at as minimal level as I can because its on at least 8 hours a day for work, and electricity is costing me a fortune here in Europe now - €0.41 (inc VAT) per KWh not including all the standing charges and other charges added on.