The price of electricity in Europe is completely out of control at the moment. Every watt of electricity we can save positively affects the electricity bill which comes at the end of the month. The RAM memorymost likely makes you pay more on your electricity bill and has a very simple solution.
We have seen a Nexthink report on the energy consumption of IT equipment. According to the report, they scanned over 3.5 million computers. Approximately 34% of analyzed systems take more than 5 minutes to boot. This is high power consumption that does no useful work. And the main culprit for this boot delay is RAM.
RAM memory increases your electricity bill
It may seem a little surreal that our computer’s RAM memory will cause a hole in the electricity bill. The reality is that it may affect more than we can imagine.
In the study, it is stated that a fifth of the teams analyzed were over three years old. These systems took little time to start, they were powerful systems with good performance. But they encountered many very slow systems. After analyzing them carefully, they detected that the main problem was in the RAM memory.
They found that 80% of older systems tested had extremely slow boot times. As noted, we’re talking over 5 minutes on startup, which is beyond any logical parameter.
After further analysis, 98% of these systems are dramatically improved by upgrading RAM. Additionally, some configuration tweaks have been made to reduce delays.
Above all, the analysis shows that these slow systems generate 450 tonnes of CO2 per year. To give us an idea, this is equivalent to the emissions that would be generated by just over 190,000 liters of gasoline.
Something as simple as changing the RAM (upgrading it) and making a few adjustments in the BIOS, boot times are reduced. This means reducing electricity consumption and therefore CO2 emissions.
Other tips to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions
If you have an old computer (say 5 years old) and you see that its performance is dropping, it is still perfectly useful. In addition to RAM, we can change the storage unit. We may have a mechanical hard drive (HDD), in which case it is advisable to upgrade to an SSD. SSDs have much higher read and write speeds than HDDs and also consume much less power.
For those with a more modern system, there are a few adjustments that can be made to save on your electricity bill:
- Turn off RGB LED lighting on all components (where possible)
- You can reduce the working frequency of the processor and even disable some cores
- You can reduce the graphics card working frequency if you are going to play light titles such as Fortnite, Minecraft or LoL; among others
- Instead of putting your computer to sleep, shut it down completely
- If you have a laptop, when the battery is fully charged, unplug it and use the battery
