Although electricity prices are trending down and could potentially become even cheaper in the future with renewable energy, the cost of electricity is an important factor for households, especially if they use a lot of electronic devices. Gamers add a lot of electricity to the usual things like cooking, cooling, watching TV, cleaning the house and doing laundry.
But how much does gaming as a hobby really matter? In our special we give you some tips on how you can calculate your electricity costs for gaming yourself.
So that you know how much power your PC or game console uses, even without an electricity meter, we have also summarized the power requirements of current gaming graphics cards and some CPUs and researched the power requirements of the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series. But we'll start with methods on how you can calculate your electricity costs in general.
Calculate electricity costs
In order to calculate the annual electricity costs of a device, you just need to know how many watts the device in question requires on average to operate and how long you use it per day. To find out how many watts your PC uses while playing, use a power meter or estimate the power consumption using our hardware tables that will follow later.
For the daily usage time, you should try to estimate how long you play every day – measured in hours, since the electricity price is given per KWh (kilowatt hour). If a device uses 1000 watts and runs for one hour, that is exactly one KWh. To calculate your daily playing time, you can of course also estimate your weekly or monthly workload and break it down into one day.
However, keep in mind that you may play a lot in some months but not in others, be it because of the weather or just because a lot of interesting new games traditionally come out in autumn and winter, for example. It may be that in the spring and summer you rarely play during the week and then eight hours on the weekend, so that's ten hours for the week, or about 1.4 hours per day.
But you play twice as much in autumn and winter, i.e. 2.8 hours per day. Then take the average for the annual cost calculation, i.e. 2.1 hours per day. But what exactly is the formula for calculating the annual costs? We have embedded the formula for you as a graphic here, including an explanation of what the variables stand for:
Source: Antonio Funes
Calculate electricity costs
The 0.356 comes from the fact that there are 365 days, which we multiply by 0.001 in order to convert the following watt information into kilowatts. How much power a gaming PC needs obviously depends on the exact hardware – we'll get to that later. But let's take a PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 as an example.
Such a PC requires around 350 watts when playing games, a 27-inch monitor around 50 watts, for a total of 400 watts. If we play for an average of two hours every day, with an electricity price of €0.35/KWh the result is: 0.365 x 400 x 2 x 0.35 = €102.20 per year.
We have created a graphic to show how much the total costs increase depending on the electricity price (0.25 to 0.45 euros per KWh) – each of the lines represents a daily playing time of 1 to 6 hours. The calculation basis is our example with the PC monitor combination that consumes 400 watts:
Source: Antonio Funes
Electricity costs: scenarios
If the PC uses 100 watts less, then it is only 75 percent of the respective annual costs. However, if it consumes 500 watts, it is 25 percent more. Outside of games, you can calculate the PC's power requirement to be around 70 to 100 watts. The question of whether gaming is expensive fun or not is of course a matter of opinion.