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.

  • Xanza@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Chest freezers are exceptionally energy efficient. It’s not a very good comparison.

    • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 month ago

      Ah, but only one is a chest freezer 😉

      That, and I used to have a freezer that was a power suck.

  • AliSaket@mander.xyz
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    1 month ago

    Yeah I made a similar discovery after installing a Shelly Switch with Power Metering. The monitors and their brightness make a huge difference as well when in or near idle (for photography, so not a surprise). I’ve also implemented an “anti-standby” function, so the switch opens whenever the current falls under a specific threshold.

    For the WoL, since I have a switch, I configured my BIOS so it would turn on after power loss. Now I can start to boot up from afar :)

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    Cool!

    Just be cautious that you don’t over-optimize for power. I ran around my house w/ a Kill-a-watt meter checking everything and made some tweaks, and I still don’t think it has paid for itself since power costs are so low here ($0.12-0.13/kWh, so 10Wh 24/7 < $1/month), and some of the things I tried doing made my life kinda suck. So I backed off a bit and found a good middleground where I got 80% of the benefit w/o any real compromises.

    For example, here’s what I ended up with:

    • put desktop to sleep - power draw is negligible, and I don’t need to keep typing my FDE password to use it
    • “upgraded” NAS from old 2009 HW to my old gaming PC HW (1st gen Ryzen) - cut power draw in half, but I had to buy some RAM; will take years to pay off w/ electricity savings, but it has much better performance in the meantime
    • turn off work laptop - was drawing ~20W; I WFH MThF, so I leave it on Th night for convenience, but have it sleep M-W and turn it off Friday

    I could probably cut a bit more if I really try, but that would be annoying.

    • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 month ago

      Yeah, my power bill is pretty reasonable already, considering my large family plus all the electronics I run. I just like seeing what everything is doing as a matter of curiosity.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        Oh yeah, as a hobby, it’s absolutely fun. I like tinkering with all kinds of things.

        My point was to just be careful since it’s not necessarily going to be worth the expense and time.

        I’ve been considering getting a breaker-level power monitor to watch for spikes. It’s a bit more expensive (hundreds of dollars), but it measures the types of things I’m interested in. My kid flipped on our gutter heaters (I never use them) and shot our electricity bill to the moon for a couple months until I noticed. If I had a home energy monitor, I would’ve noticed a crazy energy spike and that might have paid for itself.

        • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          1 month ago

          Yeah, I never expect a financial ROI for hobbies; the ROI for that is nothing more than my own enjoyment.

  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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    29 days ago

    Yeah, I’ve actually been pretty disappointed as of late with the power consumption of my custom PCs. I actually can’t remember the last time I had a PC with sleep states that actually work, maybe it was 8 years ago?

    On my last motherboard, whenever you woke the machine from sleep, some board modules wouldn’t power up correctly, you had to restart to get full functionality again. I have a second PC as a home media server, that one never fully wakes up from any sleep state (luckily it’s a server, so it’s always on). My current gaming PC regularly crashes whenever the machine is (ironically) at low processor load. (That’s the amd automatic energy saving features totally failing)

    I don’t know whether to blame the motherboards, the processors, or the OS, but any way you slice it, my computers are only happy if they’re consuming 300 watts all the time…

    And on the other hand, I gather chest freezers are actually decently efficient.

  • Codilingus@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    It will help some, and will also help temps, but AMD hardware does well with undervolting, especially the 5800X3D. I undervolt mine, and read the consensus that - 30 across all cores should be achievable for anyone, unless they’re really, really unlucky. My 6800 XT I also only run @ 92% Voltage, and it runs cooler and faster now, too.

      • Codilingus@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        The CPU was done in BIOS on an ASUS x570. For me it was under AI Tweaker > Precision Boost Override > Curve Optimizer.

        The GPU was done in the driver software on Windows. Or LACT if on Linux.

  • sploosh@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I recently bought a Mac Mini because music production on Linux had me fighting my tools more than using them. My Linux box is a 7800x3d/7800xtx. The Mini idles at 4w, while the 78000xtx alone idles closer to 50w. I use the mini for everything non-gaming now.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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    1 month ago

    Couple of thoughts:

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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        1 month ago

        Depends on the driver. Usually for finicky ones you can do an rmmod at suspend and a modprobe on resume. What distro, and are you using the default suspend mechanism?

        • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          yes, i’m on ubuntu, using all the default drivers.

          and i would guess its finnicky because its an old laptop.

          is it a matter of scripting rmmod and modprobe to run on suspend/wake?

          • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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            1 month ago

            There are a couple of ways:

            1. Formally add a system entry to run at suspend/resume (like how nvidia does in their driver package)

            Or

            1. Write a script that rmmods, suspends, sleeps, modprobes, and map it to Cntrl-Alt-Shift-S

            I usually do 2 because I like the hotkey method for desktops, and it keeps things the same for both. Also allows me to close a lid on a laptop and leave it on. But 1 is more “formal”.

            Happy to share some scripts if you’d like, on my phone now, though.

            • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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              1 month ago

              how do i do 1? having timeout to suspend and lid close to suspend would be great. and id like to see some example scripts!

              i had pretty much given up on standby with this one.

    • Sinthesis@lemmy.today
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      1 month ago

      Place a surge protector between the smart plug and the PC to be safe.

      What benefit does this serve in this situation?

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      1 month ago

      This game 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

      • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        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.

    • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 month ago

      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 😬

        • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          1 month ago

          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 🫤

            • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOP
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              1 month ago

              FYI - the cluster is pulling 115-140 watts.

              • 1x Mac mini 2014, running OMV as a dedicated NAS (i5-4308U, 16GB RAM)
              • 4-bay Sabrent DS-SC4B, attached to Mac mini (3x 4TB WD Reds in RAID5, 1x 4TB WD Black as hot spare)
              • 1x 8TB WD backup drive (it’s something)
              • 2x HP Elitedesk 800 G3 mini (or G4, don’t remember), both running Proxmox (i7-7700T, 32GB RAM each)
              • 1x Dell Optiplex 7050 SFF running Proxmox (i7-7700, 32GB RAM)

              All running multiple VMs (Docker and other) and LXC containers.

              I’m impressed, honestly. I was expecting 200+ watts minimum. It’ll be interesting to see the spikes as it’s used over time. I am going to move the HA server (Lenovo M710q running HAOS on a Pentium G4560T & 4GB RAM) down to the cluster soon, as it’s sitting on my desk at the moment…

              • catloaf@lemm.ee
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                1 month ago

                I’m surprised! Seems like it should be more, but I haven’t done any wattage calculations in a while, so maybe power efficiency really has gotten that much better.

                Do you know if the drives were spun up or down at the time? I know idle vs. active makes a difference, but if they were spun down entirely, that’s kind of cheating.

          • VonReposti@feddit.dk
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            1 month ago

            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

      • amorpheus@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        You can also test if multiple monitors is having an effect.

        Using sleep mode is a good idea anyways, regardless of idle draw.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
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    1 month ago

    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?

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      1 month ago

      Plus PC that’s idling is just adding an attack surface IMHO

      This tinfoil getting hella tight lately 🥲

          • tofuwabohu@slrpnk.net
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            1 month ago

            No. What kind of attack are you afraid of by idling a computer connected to your ISP router?

            • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              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.

              • tofuwabohu@slrpnk.net
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                1 month ago

                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.

                • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  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

  • JASN_DE@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
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        1 month ago

        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.

        • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          1 month ago

          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.

          • MudMan@fedia.io
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            1 month ago

            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.