Calculating Power Requirements and Costs

To find out now how much your PC actually costs to run, you will first need to know your power consumption. For this article, we will use three sample systems representing differing levels of hardware and performance. The specifications for the sample systems can be found in our previous article on power supply units. Power consumption is as follows:

Electricity providers report power use in kilowatts hours, since the power consumption of your entire house is going to be large compared to a single PC. Every light bulb, TV, microwave, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, etc. requires power. Unless you are running a lot of computers, it may not even be necessary to think much about how much your computer uses without addressing those other areas first. Still, there's a large difference between an entry-level PC with EIST/Cool & Quiet sitting at the desktop and a high-end PC running the latest 3D game.

For our comparisons, we will look at two states in the US (North Carolina and California) and Germany will represent Europe. We used an exchange rate of $1.30 per Euro. Power use is calculated by the above chart, factoring in the efficiency of the power supply. For simplicity's sake, we will start by assuming 82% efficiency on all systems and loads. Divide the power consumption by the power supply efficiency and you end up with the actual power use in Watts. Converting Watts into kWh requires a bit more math: take the power draw in Watts and multiply that by the number of hours a device is running, and then divide that number by 1000. The results are as follows:

If you've ever wondered why Europe seems to be pushing for higher efficiency devices than the US, the above charts should provide an easy answer. Sure, very few systems actually consume 400W or more continually, but plenty of businesses run hundreds of 100W-200W PCs 24/7. Of course, other business expenses generally far outweigh power costs if you have that many PCs -- for example, the hundreds of employees sitting in front of those PCs likely cost 100 times as much per year, give or take. Still, the cost of leaving a high-end system running even eight hours a day at your house is not trivial, with idle power consumption costs ranging from around $100 to $300 per year. So let's delve a little deeper.