Over the next few weeks, I'm going to TRY to accurately measure my power consumption doing daily work tasks on my big tower PC, the Steam Deck, and the HP Dev One laptop. (Using a Kill-A-Watt P3).
ALSO? Gaming power consumption comparisons between my desktop PC & the Xbox Series X, both at 4K resolution.
I expect it will be an eye-opening experience and I'll never turn on my tower again.
This will undoubtedly branch off into all kinds of software testing too. YES, I'll record & share data...
@killyourfm If you are interested in measuring your entire setup, You could get an extension cord plug all devices in and measure all of them at once with the Kill-a-watt.
@vsaw True, true. And what I'm really trying to capture is the power consumption differences between operating systems, form factors, and eventually proprietary vs open-source software.
I'll repeat the same tests with #Fedora 38 #Linux tomorrow.
What I'm beginning is a journey to capture the power consumption differences between operating systems, form factors, and eventually, proprietary vs open-source software.
@killyourfm Fedora Linux with which desktop environment, though? Gnome and KDE are known resource hogs compared to XFCE and others for instance. Or is this part of the software analysis that will follow?
Starting #Fedora 38 power consumption tests, and decided to see how much extra power gets consumed by simply switching refresh rate from 60Hz to 120Hz (as this demands more work from the #Radeon card).
As a refresher, it's a tower PC w/ [#AMD Ryzen 3900X + Radeon RX 6800 XT]
1% CPU utilization (idle) @ 60Hz: 67W (this is the same result as Windows 11, btw)
1% CPU utlilization (idle)@ 120Hz: 97W
So an extra 30W pulled from the wall just to double my desktop refresh rate. Is it worth it?
In the UK, at 8 hours of operation per day, that 120Hz refresh rate boost would only result in about £30 per year.
But that ecological footprint multiplied by millions of people? Well, that might truly suck. Especially when we add up all the other "quality of life" things we enjoy with modern desktop PCs.
(I don't know how to make these calculations, and maybe this is something that @be4foss or @baldpolnareffart would excel at?)
@killyourfm that's a really cool project! I started a small tool to gather this kind of data (https://github.com/lutris/hardmon) but it's for CPU and GPU only. What do you use to measure power consumption from the wall? I have some smart plug which might do the trick
@mathieucomandon hardmon looks really useful! After all, CPU and GPU are going to drive the majority of power usage.
Does it depend on the machine having various system sensors available? (For background, I use to use Phoronix Test Suite for stuff like this, but yours gets straight to the point and would probably be a better option for me).
@killyourfm I've tried to avoid any dependency and keep the whole thing as a single file so it's easy to run on any machine that has python. It does require root where mangohud does not but mangohud hasn't been able to report the CPU power.
@killyourfm would be worthy to note that your low (288W for Dirt 5 at 1440p) would pretty much be my high. I measured around 210W max from a 5700XT and 80W max from a Ryzen 5 2600. 4k gaming has a much heavier impact on power consumption than 120Hz gaming. I haven't tried 4k gaming, but with FSR and DLSS it may no longer be necessary to render at such high resolutions?
@killyourfm on some games they are already enabled by default. FSR is pretty much what makes a game like Dead island 2 playable on a Steam Deck. The whole portable gaming PC trend might help getting games that are less power hungry by default. On the other hand, I can't wait to see what UE5 games look like... That will step up the power hunger...
@baldpolnareffart Right now I'm just throwing notes and results in Joplin. Not very organized yet. But I would like to make all this public, and have other people running similar tests.
@killyourfm I think before collecting data from various different people, we should try to organise some sort of guideline to follow, just to make sure everyone who's involved is on the same page.
We could start collecting individual data and try to look for interesting patterns before asking the community to submit anything
You can follow Engineer Detlef Thoms, who does relevant back-of-the-envelope calculations in the "Sustainable Programming" course (see 04:20–06:10).
Calculate the energy savings, make certain assumptions about use (e.g., how often the savings apply), and multiply out. Given the global nature of software, the numbers scale up very quickly.
@killyourfm I'll not spoil the details for you, but I actually found that the standby power usage when not doing anything at all was far worse than the couple of hours I actively used my gaming rigs.
@killyourfm Sleep. My TV area had a constant minimum of around 23W going up to 50W at times. That includes various consoles in sleep and AVR plus TV in sleep. My stereo area ate up some 30-50 also. I furthermore found out my little drinks fridge used more power than my full-sized kitchen fridge in a day. Now, there are many more areas with power vampires, so I smart plug'ed almost everywhere and now things just turn off at night or whenever I decide to.
@killyourfm I added smart plugs in September 2022. The year before and year after added for perspective. Numbers are: total power consumption, average monthly consumption, cost. Part of it was also behavioral change, though; no more ambience videos on OLED TVs, less A/C, more laptop gaming.
@killyourfm ooof that makes me nervous to even think about. Especially when I’ll leave my PC on and go downstairs and do something else for half the day. 😭💀
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