How Much Does It Cost To Run Your PC?

Have you ever wondered how much it costs to run your PC each month? Until recently, I didn’t. In the past, I had speculated that running my PC 24/7 may cost about 10 dollars per month. However, with increasing fuel/electricity prices, it may surprise you.

Testing Strategy

Using simple readily available equipment that some of you may already own, I was able to reasonably measure the actual power consumption during run-time. We used a simple P3 Kill A Watt electricity load meter and monitor from Newegg. While not the most accurate, for this purpose it will give us a good idea of the power needed to run your PC.

Since Kill A Watt power meter is a single-plug device, we’ll list only the PC itself. The Kill A Watt meter displays the amount of power used at the wall. This reporting method includes any efficiencies lost due to the power supply’s 80 Plus power rating.

Test Configuration and Results

For this testing, we used two different Intel configurations. A high-end setup with the (current as of the time of this writing) flagship i9-10900K and RTX 2080 Super, and a more economical configuration using an i3-10100 and an AMD RX 5500 XT video card. Since every system is different as far as the monitor goes, our goal here is to give you an idea of what just the PC uses.

Test Configuration(s)

• PSU: EVGA 750W G3 (80 Plus Gold)
• Motherboard: EVGA Z490 FTW WiFi
• CPU: Intel Core i9-10900K (@ stock)
  Intel Core i3-10100 (@ stock)
• Cooling: Corsair H150i Pro RGB
• RAM: GSkill Trident Z Neo, 2×8 GB DDR4 3600 CL14 (1.35V)
• Video Card: Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Super
  Gigabyte RX 5500 XT Gaming  8G
• Hard drives: (1) Mushkin Helix 1TB (PCIe NVMe)
  (1) Toshiba TR200 500 GB SSD
  (1) Western Digital Caviar Black
• Sound Card: Integrated
• Optical Drives: N/A
• Display: Acer Predator XB1 27″ (2560 x 1440 144 Hz, IPS)

Tests Performed

Testing Results

Below is a list of peak values we gathered using real-world testing. For calculating the results, we’ll convert watts (W) to kilowatts (kW) by dividing by 1,000.

Calculating Costs

If the PC is running 24/7, like you are running Folding @ Home projects or computational workloads,  then the number of runtime hours, assuming 30-day months, can be computed as:

The generic equation to calculate cost based on kilowatt hour (kWh) is this (where kW = wattage/1000):

kW * # of  hours * Cost of electricity = Cost /month

We’ll assume an average of 13.3 cents per kWh and 24/7 runtime for the example equation below. We’ve broken that down to eight and four hours per day in the tables below.

Reducing Power Used

Conclusion

So there you have it. Our flagship Intel processor system with an Nvidia RTX 2080 Super graphics card used up to 541W in our worst-case scenario and costs almost $52 per month. If you’re gaming 24/7 for 30 days (somehow), that middling load will run you around $38. If your work just relies on the CPU running full tilt, you’re looking at around $27. When we compare that to the entry-level system, The worst case is around $22 while gaming is ~$19. That’s a pretty big difference between the systems.

If you use your PC around eight hours a day, we see those costs drop significantly. Here, if you game all eight hours, You’re looking at over $12 for the i9-10900K/RTX 2080 Super and $4 for the i3-10100/5500 XT combination.

Finally, if you only use your PC for about four hours a day, you may be hard-pressed to see it on your electric bill among everything else. Even in your worst-case scenario, the entry-level PC costs a whopping $4.33 to run for 4 hours a day all month when gaming. The high-end system is $6.26.

Sadly, we didn’t have a Ryzen based CPU on hand, but we know that, generally, these use less power than the same core/thread count Intel processors.

PS: Here’s a link to a PSU Calculator which can estimate your power needs based on what peripherals are included – very handy! Don’t forget to hit “Calculate” when finished.

If you want to do the calculations based on your state’s price for electricity, you can find that at Choose Energy or on your recent power bill.

How much does it cost to run your PC with your hardware? Use the equation above and tell us all about it in the forums!

Eric Shufro (original), Marissa Matthews, and Joe Shields