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.
What kind of freezers are they? I hear that top loading freezers are quite efficient because the cool doesn’t escape when it gets opened like a front loading one.
That’s true; once everything inside is brought down to temp, they use very little power to stay cold.
My regular fridge uses ~500-800wh a day (depending on how much it got opened). My chest freezer though, uses ~200wh/day pretty consistently.
One is a smaller chest freezer, about 3 feet tall, probably 6 or 7 cubic feet if I had to guess. The other is a Hamilton Beach upright freezer from Costco. Both are full, so that helps with keeping them cold.
Both are full so it reduces the amount of cold air that can escape when you open them.
Without space between the contents, though, they freeze in phases and it affects how they come out. Watch our or just keep air gaps.
Is your upright the one with all the little compartments? That one looked to me like the most efficient upright design I’ve ever seen.
Yep, it’s awesome. We got it for $300 to supplement the smaller chest freezer, and it’s been an absolute godsend.
And why the old “ice boxes” are top load only. And why most boat fridges/freezers are top-load, because energy is scares/finite when disconnected from power.
Evaporative clay-pot coolers are also top-load for efficiency.
Any time I clear out the chest freezer to defrost or get to something at the bottom, the lower half stays below freezing for quite a while. Love that little freezer.
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?
Plus PC that’s idling is just adding an attack surface IMHO
This tinfoil getting hella tight lately 🥲
How, if it’s not exposed to the internet? Burglars?
Is your gaming PC air gapped from the internet??
No. What kind of attack are you afraid of by idling a computer connected to your ISP router?
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.
Do you really trust your consumer grade router and firewall on the desktop?
Against random internet noise? Yes, absolutely
OK but what if you have a lava lamp that is synced to the moods of a sarcastic and greedy AI?
Security is about to get really weird. It used to be the Internet of Things we had to worry about, but now we have Things in Internet.
wtf is that 😄
But I agree, random hardware in your LAN is more of a security threat than anything coming from outside in many cases.
What about something more spooky?
Most ISP routers have sane default settings and block all incoming traffic, you don’t even reach their log in interface. If they are somewhat updated you’ll be fine in most cases.
Yeah. I got a pro managing it.
Have you considered putting your gaming pc in one of the storage freezers? /s
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 😬
Measuring my server cluster
Personally, I just don’t ask questions I don’t want the answer to.
Lat I checked, it was 40w idle for me on the kill-o-watt. Spinny rust and all!
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 🫤
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
It’s attached via USB to a 2014-era Mac Mini running OMV; it’s a dedicated NAS and nothing else. Honestly not a huge fan of that hardware setup at this point, as the Proxmox cluster running all of my VMs and whatnot sees it drop out periodically for absolutely no reason. I’ve already tweaked the network adapter within the OS to stay powered on, because apparently Apple hardware has a mind of its own and just decides to shut various components off for “power saving” reasons.
The kicker is that I’m upgrading it to a 7th-gen based server soon. My dad gave me an old Pentium 4-powered HP Proliant DL110 last year, the case of which has 10x 3.5" drive bays, and is fully ATX compatible, so I’m gonna drop in a 7th gen mobo with Pentium G4560T (already have that on my desk), a newer PSU, and an HBA card. Don’t need a ton of processing power for a dedicated NAS running OMV - just a lot of expansion capacity.
You might need to lower your expectations
Yeah… I know. 🙃
Speak for yourself…
Super, go on dear…
Have you considered putting your children in one of the storage freezers? /s
👀
This gave me 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
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.
I had a similar revelation. Home assistant has a WOL component, so you can set that up for easy starts. I’ve had mixed success with mechanisms to get HA to sleep the computer, though.
Ideally I want the machine to be sleeping I’d I’m not using it.
I use Kasm for remote access, I believe that has a WOL component as well. I haven’t set it up as such, but I plan to later on.
If you get a reliable way to sleep a windows machine via MQTT (not sure if that’s a route you’d take) but I’d be super interested in hearing about it.
Does it clock down when idle?
No idea. I would imagine it does, but that’s something I’ll need to check.
You can also test if multiple monitors is having an effect.
Using sleep mode is a good idea anyways, regardless of idle draw.
The monitors are part of a 12W draw left after shutting off the PC. The plug is measuring everything plugged into the power strip that powers all of my desktop equipment. The PC itself was drawing ~90W at idle.
If you want to expand from just monitoring a couple sockets to monitoring the whole house; I’d recommend Iotawatt. I’ve been using one of these to monitor every circuit in my house for a few years now.
You can use the built in webpages shown below to view it’s internal graphs, or setup an exporter to feed the data into external DBs like influxDB+Graphana or Emoncms.
Very cool! However, my house is a rental, so any monitoring equipment has to be somewhat non-invasive.
Edit: it helps if I actually look at the product before spouting nonsense… Looks promising.
I’m in a rental too. It’s non-invasive; just gotta pop the panel cover off, clip the transformers over the wires without disconnecting them, and put the cover back. It can all be removed just as easily.
just
Uh oh. Red flag.
gotta pop the panel cover off,
This may be where the rental agreement is broken. Define ‘pop’ . Two hands and a tool? Clear it with the landlord first. The company running the 400-unit building where I am now is gonna say F No.
That’s between you and your landlord. Mine was fine with it as it doesn’t actually modify any of the wiring.
How is it possible that it draws 100W at idle? What is it even doing?
The PC was drawing ~90W. All solid state, no spinning rust. Lots of fans though, since it’s air-cooled. Not entirely sure what was causing the draw, but it’s definitely something I want to investigate at some point.
Check your GPU power usage, I remember seeing people complaining about theirs not clocking down if they had a second monitor plugged in, and similar bugs
Worth a look. One monitor uses HDMI, the other uses DisplayPort. They’re just cheap secondhand 1080p monitors to get me by until I toss them for an ultrawide 1440p unit.
Hard drives, especially spinning discs, and RAM are probably the biggest factor at idle. I dropped my servers’ idle draw from 220w to 180w by dropping it’s RAM and replacing some older drives.
People underestimate how more RAM can be more power usage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah for real. Cheap and plentiful on eBay as well. That’s where I get mine, and company surplus.
I bought two “Eightree” brand Zigbee-compatible plugs to see how they fare.
Did you need a Zigbee hub to get them working? I was gifted an Eighttree Zigbee plug with energy monitoring, but it seems to require using a hardware hub :(
Yeah, anything Zigbee needs a hub of some sort that interfaces with the server. Zigbee is a mesh-like network of its own - it doesn’t use wifi or Bluetooth or anything.
I bought Nabu Casa’s Connect ZBT-1 dongle; it’s like $35 and plugs directly into the HA server. Super simple to configure as well, since HAOS detects it automatically. Plus, the smart plugs act as routers, so as long as there is a path of router-enabled devices that can see each other all the way to the dongle on the server, you shouldn’t need anything else.
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.
Definitely gonna check that out.
I got a UPS cause the breaker to my room likes to trip if I am gaming and someone in the house decides to microwave something for 10 minutes. My desktop, three monitors (2x1080p 60hz + a 1440p 144hz) and my 3d printer all running at full tilt will suck my 1500w UPS dry in about 2 minutes lol.
If I’m not gaming and say just watching YouTube while not 3d printing anything that same UPS can run for almost 15 minutes.
breaker to my room likes to trip if I am gaming and someone in the house decides to microwave something
… Why the hell is your pc on the same breaker as the kitchen??
The kitchen plugs should have their own dedicated breaker in most modern electrical codes (at least in North America). The voltage drop your pc experiences everytime a high-load item like a microwave or kettle is turned on, on the same circuit, is really rough on your PSU.
At least you have a UPS which presumably performs some power conditioning, but still. Not great.
That’s the best part. It’s not in the kitchen. My room is on the complete opposite side of the house. Literally the furthest room from the kitchen.
Whatever drunk moron wired the house back in the 70s did so in such a confusing manner that electricians give us the “fuck no I’m not fixing that” price when we ask them what it would cost to sort out our completely nonsensical wiring. I think the last guy we talked to quoted us 30k and he pretty much flat out told us nobody will ever want to unfuck our house.
You used the magic word, “modern.”
Lots of houses in this world are not modern, and some of them are old enough that they were retrofitted to have electricity, as mine was, rather than even being built with it to begin with. And done so in a haphazard manner when electrical codes were either much more lax than now or didn’t exist. And further when the expected power draw for a household was considerably lower, because basically all of it in the 1920’s or whatever was only used for lighting and we didn’t have all of our current appliances, TV’s, computers, 3D printers, or even indoor space heaters.
So moaning about what ought to be rather than what is really doesn’t accomplish anything, especially in OP’s case.
My small house has basically the entire ground floor wired to only two 15 amp circuits.
A lot of people aren’t even aware of the concern. That’s why I bring it up.
Paying an electrician to add a breaker is much cheaper than replacing the PC. Tho that’s up to OC if they want to pursue that. I’m just putting the info out there for them to consider.
What res is that monitor ? My 2k monitor is pretty hungry compared to my old 1080. Even just looking at the uk energy efficiency ratings for 4k tells shocks me !
Right now I just run dual 1080p. I plan on upgrading to a 120Hz+ 1440p ultrawide at some point, but priorities… My entire desk setup is currently consuming 12 watts with the PC shut off. That’s ~90W just from the PC.
So my partner and I use laptops (small flat) so really sip power compared to the 65 watt of the monitor
Very nice. I don’t like laptops for gaming, but I recognize and appreciate the utility of them; I use my laptop (Thinkpad T14 G1 AMD) more than my gaming PC for most things outside of that.
Is your GPU reducing the VRAM frequency when it’s idle?
If the vertical timing is different between the monitors, the VRAM will have to run at maximum speed all the time and that can add 20 watts or more to your idle power consumption.
No idea, honestly, it’s just the default settings. I haven’t really had any time to tinker and optimize it to my liking for a while.
