Obviously, the most direct and drastic way to save on electricity bill As for the PC, it is not for using it, but it is also obvious that for most people it is not something viable as they use it as a work tool or maybe be that it’s their favorite device for leisure hours. Either way, you can save a lot of money if you optimize both its usage and the hardware itself, so let’s see what you can do about it.
Choose more efficient hardware components
One of the most obvious things you can do to optimize your computer’s consumption is to buy low consumption components, and while it may not be possible for everyone, if you’re planning on buying a new PC, this is something you might want to consider. Obviously this will depend on each user and what they will use the PC for, because as it makes sense if you are planning to buy a PC for playing games, you are not going to choose low power components because this is also always linked to a performance penalty.
However, there are also some components that you can modify that can be used not only to improve performance but also to optimize consumption, for example change mechanical hard drives for SSD
Speaking of refrigeration, you can also keep in mind that although a cooling system liquid refrigeration It can give you better thermal performance in the equipment, it also has a much higher consumption than an air radiator, which only consumes what its fans consume while liquid cooling adds the pump to the equation, who has moderate consumption and this in the long run can be noticed.
Igualmente, si solo utilizas el PC de manera esporádica y para tareas livianas o multimedia, podrías plantearte el utilizar un PC de bajo consumo como un NUC o similar o incluso un Compute stick, que te dará todo lo necesario para ello con un consumo realmente muy low. Obviously, and we’ve mentioned this before, keep in mind that these low-power devices aren’t going to give you great performance, so it’s all about weighing what you need and what you want. make it.
Of course, when putting together a new PC, you might want to consider whether you really need the newest and most powerful processor from AMD or Intel or if maybe with some consumption lower and a midrange processor, this may be worth what you need; for example, for a gaming PC you don’t need a Core i9 with a large number of cores and a high TDP whereas with a Core i5 you probably have more than enough; you will save when purchasing the processor, and you will save on electricity consumption.
Optimize PC consumption by changing the way you use it
You would be surprised at how much power a PC consumes when you are not using it. If you are one of those people who always leave the PC on and don’t have to wait for it to boot up, know that you will be using a lot of electricity for nothing, so you should consider changing your PC usage habits and turn it off completely when you are not going to use it for a while. Likewise, even if you’ve just woken up from your PC to eat for an hour, consider turning it off or at least leaving it in sleep mode to save electricity.
The same thing happens with the monitorIt is an item that many times we do not let go when we are not using the PC and we just let it go into sleep state, but even in this state it will consume power, so it is always better. and more advisable to leave it completely off.
In this regard, we must also talk about the computer lighting; Almost every component these days, and even more so in the case of gaming-oriented devices, has RGB or some other type of lighting, which, although its consumption is quite low, in the end it all adds up. It’s great to have lights on your PC to create a beautiful ecosystem, but when you’re on your own and not showing off in front of your friends, do you need all those lights? Certainly not, so think about creating a profile to turn off all the lighting of the PC when you use it, because as we said at the end everything adds up and it is a question of optimizing the power consumption.
Techniques to optimize PC consumption
In addition to everything we have covered, there are techniques that can help you save on the electricity bill by optimizing the power consumption of the PC, techniques like underclock / undervolt which involve running the processor or the graphics card at a lower speed and voltage, consuming less power and heating less at the cost of lower performance.
Obviously, you have to keep in mind that by doing this you will reduce the performance of the PC, but if you are one of those people who have a very powerful gaming PC and use it to work most of the time, you might be interested in creating an underclock / undervolt profile that consumes less power when you really don’t need it for good performance.
