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100W while idling seems like way too much?

Edit: maybe not, they list 75W for whole system idle here with 5800X3D.

What unhealthy eating habit are you indulging in at 21:45?

If it gets the wife approval you know you are on to something

I recently bought a Mac Mini because music production on Linux had me fighting my tools more than using them. My Linux box is a 7800x3d/7800xtx. The Mini idles at 4w, while the 78000xtx alone idles closer to 50w. I use the mini for everything non-gaming now.

Chest freezers are exceptionally energy efficient. It's not a very good comparison.

I discovered a similar issue. PC desk was using 8-9W when the PC was turned OFF! My power strip was taking a bit under 1W (the little light, old), two smart bulbs as well but I'll allow those losses. An older Logitech speaker setup (2+1) was taking 6-7W, turned off! Crazy.. and illegal if it were made today (in EU). So this is completely wasted energy in my opinion.. started disconnecting the whole desk now.

For comparison, my home server is averaging 7-8W, turned on all the time:

I also learned that PC's draw a lot of power lol. I used to sit on my PC all day, now I know how much it cost. Even the monitor turning off splits the power draw by half.

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.

Cool!

Just be cautious that you don't over-optimize for power. I ran around my house w/ a Kill-a-watt meter checking everything and made some tweaks, and I still don't think it has paid for itself since power costs are so low here ($0.12-0.13/kWh, so 10Wh 24/7 < $1/month), and some of the things I tried doing made my life kinda suck. So I backed off a bit and found a good middleground where I got 80% of the benefit w/o any real compromises.

For example, here's what I ended up with:

• put desktop to sleep - power draw is negligible, and I don't need to keep typing my FDE password to use it
• "upgraded" NAS from old 2009 HW to my old gaming PC HW (1st gen Ryzen) - cut power draw in half, but I had to buy some RAM; will take years to pay off w/ electricity savings, but it has much better performance in the meantime
• turn off work laptop - was drawing ~20W; I WFH MThF, so I leave it on Th night for convenience, but have it sleep M-W and turn it off Friday

I could probably cut a bit more if I really try, but that would be annoying.

Have you considered putting your gaming pc in one of the storage freezers? /s

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?

Couple of thoughts:

1. That smart plug may not be rated to the max wattage when GPU and CPU are at full blast. Be careful, because that could be an expensive mistake. Place a surge protector between the smart plug and the PC to be safe. Also run the PC full tilt for a while and make sure the smart plug doesnt get warm. If it does, fores have been known to start from those.

2. Sounds like you know this with WoL, but suspend is your friend 😉 If the gaming PC is linux and you run into suspend issues, let me know, I've seen 'em all.

Yeah I made a similar discovery after installing a Shelly Switch with Power Metering. The monitors and their brightness make a huge difference as well when in or near idle (for photography, so not a surprise). I've also implemented an "anti-standby" function, so the switch opens whenever the current falls under a specific threshold.

For the WoL, since I have a switch, I configured my BIOS so it would turn on after power loss. Now I can start to boot up from afar :)

It has never occured to me my whole life to not suspend or shut down computers overnight. It wakes up in like 2 seconds why wouldnt you, even if it used only an extra 1W

Those storage freezers are doing nothing the vast majority of the time. Not really a fair comparison.

Yeah, energy monitoring ruined several things for me. Can't let my PC idle anymore, can only turn on the dishwasher when the sun is shining, need to explain regularly to my wife, why our home network and server infrastructure consume 130 Watts per hour, have to automate all plugs with standby devices connected...

The damn freezer consumes only 400 Watts per day while Network infrastructure, server, Wallpanels and KNX consume 3 Kilowatts, I wish I would have never learned this.