Consumption and costs plus power supply purchasing tips

In our special on the topic of electricity costs, we show you in detail how you can calculate the electricity requirements and costs for your gaming PC. We also offer you two tables that show the power requirements of modern graphics cards and CPUs. We also say a few words about power supplies and have selected 10 models or model series as buying tips.

We start with the question of how you can calculate the electricity costs for your own gaming PC. It is ideal if you have an electricity meter with its own power socket that you can plug into the socket. Such a measuring device is plugged into the socket that normally houses the power plug for the PC.

The power plug of the PC then goes into the socket of the measuring device. Alternatively, you can also plug the power strip into the meter that supplies the PC, the monitor and your speakers – this would then show you the total power requirements of these three devices.

Our information refers to the case where you only have the PC plugged into the measuring device, but can also easily be applied to the scenario where you record the power requirements of an entire power strip.

Use meter for power requirement

When it comes to measuring devices, you should make sure that they can record the kWh (kilowatt hours) and thus the electricity consumption over any period of time. Such power meters are particularly suitable if you use a longer gaming session to very reliably calculate the average consumption of the PC per hour while playing.

But don't forget to determine the power requirements of PC activities outside of games in the same way and to reset the measuring device beforehand. In both cases, you should of course also pay attention to how long the measurement period was. If you don't have a measuring device, you can also use the results from hardware tests from online magazines.

With CPUs and graphics cards, however, you often won't find the values ​​for the entire PC, but only for the tested component. There are also watt values ​​and no kWh results – we'll go into calculating the electricity costs using the watt values ​​later still in detail.

Source: Be Quiet


be quiet! Pure Power CM

Estimate electricity needs for the whole year

But no matter how you end up finding out how much electricity your PC uses per hour while gaming and away from gaming, you can use the kWh values ​​determined to calculate how much electricity your PC costs you per year. To do this, you also need information about how long per day you play and how long per day the PC is used for things other than gaming.

You have to estimate these two values ​​yourself – don't forget that, for example, you may sit at the PC less often in summer than in winter.

You also have to take vacation or vacation times into account, and anyway for many of you it is probably the case that you only play for an hour or two in the evening during the week, and then maybe not every day, but on the weekend you do play every now and then regularly plays for more than six hours.

If you play for a good hour on three of the five weekdays and then five hours each on the weekend, you will get 13 to 14 hours per week, or to put it simply: two hours per day on average.

Also think about how long per day you use the PC for things other than games. With these two hourly values ​​as well as the information about your PC's power requirements, you can then calculate how much your PC costs you in electricity per year. On the next page we will present formulas and example calculations.