Digging Into the Electrical Cost of PC Gaming [Slashdot]

[DP ServBot]

New submitter MBAFK writes "My coworker Geoff and I have been taking power meters home to see what the true cost of PC gaming is. Not just the outlay for hardware and software, but what the day-to-day costs really are. If you assume a 20 hour a week habit, and using $0.11 a KWH, actually playing costs Geoff $30.83 a year. If Geoff turns his PC off when he is not using it, he could save $66 a year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Ryudo]

I don't have to pay electric or water or heating or cooling. So This means nothing to me.

[Guru of Time and Space]

Energy usage should matter to you.
http://ilovemountains.org/my-connection

-GoTaS

[Griking]

There's a little too much information missing from this for it to be useful to me.

Do these figures include powering up a monitor? What size monitor? CRT or LCD? What kind of video card and power supply since power usages can vary greatly between a off the shelf HP Pavilion and a real gaming PC with a decent video card and PS.

I also would have liked to have seen cost to play numbers for the 360, PS3 and Wii as well just for comparison.

[kedawa]

The article, like most of its ilk, also dodges the fact that most of that energy ends up as heat, which is hardly wasteful if you live in a cooler climate.
Every bit of heat my PC produces is welcome in my cold as hell apartment. If it weren't coming from my PC, it'd be coming from a baseboard heater, which is far less fun to look at.

[Orion Pimpdaddy]

If anyone wants to measure how much it costs to run one device, there's a product called Kill a Watt that gets inserted between the device and the wall socket. It has a digital display that tells you how much it's costing, and it keeps track of it over time.

[Gameguy]

So for less than the cost of 1 or 2 days pay(tops) at minimum wage, you can run your PC for an entire year. Unless I read the original article wrong it would cost less than $100 a year if you left your PC on all the time, not even shutting it down when not in use. Who's really going to complain about the cost of this? This should be tied with the thread on poor people using electronics more.




"The electric bill is up $0.40 this month!! There's only one thing to do!!"