[barrkel]

24h x 30 days x .5kW x 0.25 CHF/kWh gives me 90 CHF a month to run my PC, assuming it never sleeps.

Have you run the calculation? It's worthwhile configuring suspend for PCs these days. My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.

[PragmaticPulp]

> 24h x 30 days x .5kW

No modern PC should be pulling 500W all the time.

Idle power can be as low as 20-30W depending on the build.

You should also allow it to sleep, of course.

> My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.

Something is wrong. A 3090 should only pull about 20 Watts at idle: https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-review-... . You might have some process forcing it into full-speed 3D mode for some reason.

[hulitu]

Windows indexing service.

[loeg]

> 500W

500W is a very high average power consumption. And my electricity is 0.13 USD/kWh, which is about half 0.25 CHF/kWh.

True average power is probably below 100W, for a total cost in the realm of 10 CHF or USD per month.

[Someone]

In the USA, for a significant part of the year, chances are you have to add the electricity costs of running your airconditioning to get rid of that heat.

If you’re living in a colder state, you may have to subtract the costs of having lower heating costs.

[loeg]

Sure, although it's not a ton of heat either way and doesn't make a large impact on the net cost.

[epolanski]

The lowest contract you can get in italy is 40 cents.

Also, consuming more energy is bad and this rush to apologize lack of innovation in gpu and cpus weve seen in the last decade is ridiculous.

Where does it end? I'm okay with a 5000cc truck because airplanes and cruise ships are much worse?

[LegitShady]

the last 2-3 generations of cpus and gpus have seen the most innovation, efficiency, and performance gains in a long time.

If you don't want to drive a 5l truck, don't drive one, but 500W is not an average load, and if you have high electricity costs thats a you problem not an everyone else problem.

The largest parts of my electrical bill are distribution and overhead charges that don't change whether I use power or not. The marginal utility of the power vs the cost is quite reasonable.

[giobox]

This is nonsense. The last 2-3 generations of GPUs have seen nothing of the sort in terms of efficiency, the same is also true of many Intel desktop CPUs. The latest Alder Lake desktop parts from Intel have been universally criticized for power draw too.

Each of the last 4 generations of mid to high-end card from Nvidia has required more electricity than the last. By Nvidia's own admission, their future chips will get larger and hotter to some extent due to slow down in moore's law and future process nodes being harder to reach. The die size of the parts has also grown which does not help.

Its not a small trajectory either; 4 years ago the most power hungry consumer part from Nvidia was a 1080ti which would easily draw 250w under load. today that number is now 500w for the current 3090ti, and rumored to be 800-1000 for the 4xxx parts launching end of this year. A GPU often will sit at peak draw for hours at a time in games as they try to push as many FPS as possible.

A current gaming machine with recent components can easily exceed 500w constant load during gameplay, and this figure will rise again with the 4xxx parts.

The ONLY exception to this really is Apple devices, and even then its not clear we can compare an M1/M2 GPU to the fastest parts Nvidia offer.

[epolanski]

You and me are seeing very different news if you dont see midrange gpus consumimg 250w under load and cpus getting over 100.

The performance gains are non existent and largely driven by bigger and bigger chips on smaller nodes.

There is no innovation in gpu and x86 cpus space since a long time, that happens only on arm nowadays.

[jamiek88]

>5000cc truck because airplanes and cruise ships are much worse

Oh boy, you should visit USA sometime. A 5 liter truck is the small one.

[xani_]

The fuck are those calculations ? Are you trying to mislead people on purpose?

Who is running their computer at 500W 24/7 ?

[bufferoverflow]

500W 24/7 consumption? What do you do? Train ML non-stop?

Your example is in now representative of reality.

[nightski]

I use suspend on my PC and I definitely do not run it 24h, or anywhere close to that. Also power is $0.08/kWh where I live.

[gambiting]

That's insanely cheap power, use it while you can. I'm paying £0.40/kWh, so about 46 cents per kWh.

[brewdad]

Really?

My power is some of the cheapest in the country and we pay ~13 cents/kWh. It's a little misleading though since my bill breaks out generation and distribution costs into separate line items. They are both billed per kWH though and add up to 13 cents.

[nightski]

Yes. We have a fixed basic connection charge of $20. So it's really close to your $0.13/kWh when that is taken into account.

I wasn't trying to be misleading though because the point is the basic charge does not increase with usage. So for each additional kWh we add to that it's only $0.089/kWh.

[brewdad]

No, that's fair. I have an additional basic charge too. Congrats on the cheap power.

[maccard]

And double that number if you're in the UK.