Computers need electricity to function, they often leave on all day and sometimes in some cases. But how much energy does a PC need, exactly "> Which power supply to choose for the PC and how many Watts are required
First of all, the unit of measurement for calculating energy is the Kwh (Kilowatt Hour).
To know how much a bulb that consumes 20 watts consumes, the calculation to be done is (20 X n. Hours) / 1000 and you get the Kwh.
Traditional desktop computers are the ones that consume the most energy.
However, the amount of energy a desktop PC uses is often overestimated.
Let's take the case of a normal desktop PC with integrated graphics card processor and two hard disks, the power consumption will be about 100 Watts when stationary, 200 Watts while using, which can exceed 300 or 350 Watts at full load.
Older processors are less energy efficient, so they consume more.
From what I've read, in this research, it seems that AMD processors are less efficient than Intel ones.
The video card is one of the most energy-hungry components: from 10-30 watts with the PC at minimum up to an additional 200 watts or even 600 watts for extreme video game configurations.
This may seem a lot, but if you consider the enormously higher consumption of an air conditioner, an electric stove or a dishwasher, it is not exaggerated in the end.
Making a very rough estimate it can be said that a home computer will never exceed 10% of the total energy consumption.
A laptop, of course, uses less energy than a desktop PC also because they are equipped with processors and video cards with lower consumption and have a power supply that does not exceed 130 watts.
A portable laptop as small as an ultrabook or netbook consumes even less, up to half.
Overall, powerful laptops have a very low power if they are stationary (but obviously on) from 20 watts to 40 or 50 watts.
The savings become significant because GPU is turned off completely when not needed.
So if you only use a laptop, the energy consumption is really low even if it stays on all day.
When the laptop is charging, it increases the power consumption with an extra 20-30 watts if inactive.
A fast-charging laptop uses more energy than a slow-charging one (other things being equal).
even if you recharge your pc every day, I would say that the cost of electricity consumed can be considered not very significant.
Monitors
Old and heavy CRT monitors consumed a lot of energy.
Today everyone has LCD screens, but it's not that the energy spent to keep them on is much less.
On the monitors, the issue of consumption varies greatly depending on the technology used, the size and also the model.
Size is a significant factor, a 27-inch consumes more than a 24-inch.
An LED screen consumes less than normal LCD.
In general, it can go from 20 Watts of consumption up to 90.
External hard drives, printers and speakers that are connected to the computer have rather negligible consumption.
The fact is that these are components that are used only for short periods of time, remaining almost always inactive.
To summarize:
A typical desktop computer uses 200 to 650 watts depending on the pieces with which it is assembled.
Add another 15-70 watts for an LCD monitor, another 7-10 watts for the router or other connected devices.
Most laptops use around 15-60 watts, much less than desktops.
With most devices you can look at the label to see how much energy they use, even if it is the theoretical maximum that is never spent.
If a computer's label says 500 watts, it could use just 150 when it is actually running, and no more than 200 if it is used with more complex programs.
When the computer enters sleep / standby mode, the computer consumes very little energy, so it is important to configure the power saving options by setting automatic standby after a certain period of activity.
To get more precise estimates you can use Joulemeter, a Microsoft program reported in another article, to calculate the cost of electricity consumed by the computer .
If you want to calculate the cost of the energy consumed by the computer, just do this: [(Watts x N. Hours) / 1000] X Cost per Kilovatt-hour = Total cost .
If you take the Enel standard tariff plan and pay a price, for example, of 0.14 Euros per Kilowatt-hour, you can estimate the consumption of a desktop PC used all day, for 24 hours, all year, with a calculation of this type: 200 watts x 24 hours x 365 days = 1, 752, 000 watt-hours or 1, 752 kilowatt-hours.
If you pay 0.14 Euros per kWh, the cost of one year of computer energy consumption would be around 250 Euros.
If you use a normal PC that consumes 100 Watts, for 5 days a week, 2 hours a day, we make 100 X 10 x 52 weeks = 52000 Watts per hour or 52 Kwh.
52 X 0.14 = 7.28 Euros of annual electricity expenditure.
Beyond the specific calculations (correct me if they are wrong), what we want to say is that an average computer is almost never the cause of a high light bill .
Of course, if you use a high-end PC for video games with a big warning, consumption can rise significantly and become relevant, but this I think is not a common case.
