If you are worried about the rise in the price of electricity, you are probably looking for ways to save on your electricity bill; According to a study by the Energy Saving Trust association, around 8% of household electricity consumption is due to PC , with 25% due to other consumer electronics devices (not household appliances), which represents a cost of about 50 euros a year for each PC, a figure that rises much more in PC gaming. In this article we are going to tell you how to optimize the consumption of your PC to try to reduce this cost as much as possible.
Obviously, the most direct and radical way to save on the electricity bill with respect to the PC is not to use it, but it is also obvious that for most people this is not something viable because they use it as a work tool or perhaps it is their favorite device for leisure hours. In any case, you can save a lot of money if you optimize both its use and the hardware itself, so let’s see what you can do about it.
Choose more efficient hardware components
One of the most obvious things you can do to optimize your computer’s consumption is to purchase low-consumption components , and although this is not possible for everyone, if you intend to buy a new PC, it is something that you could have in mind. account. Obviously this will depend on each user and what they are going to use the PC for, since of course if you intend to buy a PC to play games, you will not choose low-consumption components since this is also always linked to a performance penalty .
However, there are also some components that you can change and that can serve you not only to improve performance but also to optimize consumption, such as changing mechanical hard drives for SSDs . In addition to this, you must also take into account that the more performance the components have, the more heat they will generate and the more consumption will be generated due to their cooling systems, and not just the component itself.
Speaking of cooling, you can also bear in mind that although a liquid cooling system can give you better thermal performance in the equipment, it also has a much higher consumption than an air heatsink, which only consumes what its fans consume while that a liquid cooling adds the pump to the equation, that it has a moderate consumption and that in the long term it can be noticed.
Likewise, if you only use the PC sporadically and for light or multimedia tasks, you could consider using a low consumption PC such as a NUC or similar or even a Compute stick, which will give you everything you need for it with a really very high consumption. under. Obviously, and we have already mentioned it before, keep in mind that these low-consumption devices are not going to give you great performance, so it is a matter of assessing what you need and what you want to achieve with it.
Of course, when assembling a new PC you may want to ask yourself if you really need the latest and most powerful processor from AMD or Intel or if perhaps with a lower consumption and mid-range CPU it may be worth what you need; for example, for a gaming PC you don’t need a Core i9 with a large number of cores and a high TDP when with a Core i5 you probably have more than enough; you will save when buying the processor, and you will save on electricity consumption.
Optimize PC consumption by changing the way you use it
You would be surprised at the amount of power consumed by a PC when you are not using it. If you are one of those who always leave the PC on and then not have to wait for it to start up, you should know that you will be using a lot of electricity for nothing, so you should consider changing your habits of using the PC and turning it off completely when you are not going to use it. for a certain time. Likewise, even if you’ve just gotten up from your PC to go eat for an hour, consider turning it off or at least leaving it in sleep mode to save on electricity.
The same happens with the monitor , it is an element that many times we do not leave off when we do not use the PC and we simply let it go to sleep, but even in this state it will be consuming energy, so it is always better and more advisable to leave it. completely off.
In this regard, we also have to talk about PC lighting ; Nowadays almost all the components, and more so in the case of gaming-oriented devices, have RGB lighting or of another type, lighting that although its consumption is quite low, in the end it all adds up. It’s great to have lighting on your PC to create a beautiful ecosystem, but when you’re alone and not showing off in front of your friends, do you need all those lights? Surely not, so consider creating a profile to turn off all the lighting on the PC when you are using it, since as we have said at the end everything adds up and this is about optimizing electricity consumption.
Techniques to optimize PC consumption
In addition to everything that we have mentioned, there are some techniques that can help you save on the electricity bill by optimizing the PC’s electrical consumption, techniques such as underclock / undervolt that consist of making the processor or graphics card work at a lower speed and voltage, consuming less power and heating less at the cost of delivering lower performance.
Obviously you should bear in mind that by doing this you will be reducing the performance of the PC, but if you are one of those who have a very powerful gaming PC and use it to work most of the time, you might be interested in creating an underclock / undervolt profile to that consumes less energy when you really don’t need it to have a great performance.
