How Much Power Does Everything Use?

[Music] you know it's only a matter of time before you buy one of these yourself for no reason other than to finally figure out how many watts that red standby light on your TV is using I'm just that little bit ahead of you cuz I've got mine already and I spent many happy hours the other day plugging stuff in and measuring how much power I was consuming let's start with simple stuff you'll find around the house going from lowest to highest power consumption the lowest I found was my toothbrush charger which seemed to consume just 0.6 wats of power and it's probably why it takes a whole night to charge this thing still it's not something I'll worry about leaving plugged in all the time next was my bedside light which has three different brightness settings all of them are dim but some are more so than others and went on it consumed somewhere between 1 and 5 wats of power which I expected to be the case but it was still fun to see the power consumption jump up as the brightness setting increased my phone's charging is rated at 30 WTS the charger I used 65 Watts but in practice it only consumed 10 to 15 wats of power no matter which settings I activated or disabled now we jump up to the clothes dryer I use I love myself a washing line but I live in England and so I have a room set up with a drying rack and a dehumidifier the dehumidifier uses 150 WTS in use and the drying rack when turned on and heated 250 now electric dryers used between 1,800 and 5,000 WS so I've got to weigh that up against my setup which is about 400 WS an hour and it probably takes about 12 hours to dry stuff so 5,000 WS not as efficient as I'd have liked so maybe I should get a dryer or just wait until some to dry all my clothes or just don't wash them at all next I tested my 700 WT microwave to see how many watts this 700 WT microwave uses when running at full 700 W power huh 1,270 apparently the air fryer is next being the cheaper alternative to an oven which on average can consume about 1,500 WS of power in use my air fryer saves a massive 25 watts by consuming just 1,475 instead but maybe it's more power efficient because it Cooks things faster than up from wood or as this one does Burns one side and leaves the other side soggy no matter how many times it turned the food over hair dryer versus Kettle which consumes the most power well the haird dryer had three settings the lowest was 1,000 WTS the middle was 1,600 and the one you'd actually use 25 is meanwhile the kettle was the most power demanding thing in the entire house at a stoning 3,000 whats I have expected it to explode in my face right there and then remember that this is a British Kettle and not one of the slur American types so yours might consume less not that I use a kettle anymore because I now have a boiling water tap which is apparently more efficient cuz it has a tank of always boiled water that maintains its temperature every couple of minutes I don't know about its efficiency but I like it cuz it makes using the tap a truly terrifying experience now for the more complicated thingies screens were the most surprising for me this 24in High refresh rate gaming monitor consumed about 24 wats in use that was for 60 HZ it Rose to 26 Watts for 144 HZ and 28 wats for 180 HZ great Returns on investment there higher refresh rates consumed more but only a little bit more and I'd say those few Watts go a long way towards improving your gaming experience so don't be afraid to wrap those refresh rates up meanwhile this massive 60 HZ 75 in TV was about 150 WS in use which again given the immense surface area it's lighting up seems kind of reasonable the surprise came from the standby power consumption which was sometimes something super low like 0.3 Watts but other times as high as 12 or 13 for my gaming Monitor and up to 20 for the TV and I'm not sure what caused this it seemed like manually turning them off would more consistently drop them to the correct 3 wats of power so I'm going to say that when in standby mode a screen shouldn't consume power but it might either way I can no longer trust screens in standby mode and must now turn them off at the mains just to be sure thanks a bunch what a meter but the confusion of screens was nothing compared with the this laptop which has left me more confused than I was even before I started and believe me I started confused take its processor for instance an Intel i7 1260p is rated at 28 wats but it doesn't have to consume as much as that if it doesn't need to but also it may momentarily use more than that when required and also cuz it's Intel so yeah this 28 watt figure is just it's just there so you know already the wattage readings for this laptop are going to be a mess laptop off but plugged in it consumed one watt of power which doesn't seem like it's charging but it's also quite a lot if it isn't anyway I turned it on waited for it to all load up and to idle on the desktop where it consumed about 10 WS of Power with occasional spikes to about 50 what are you doing computer while I expected fluctuations in power consumption I didn't expect such wild or frequent ones I tried turning the OLED screen brightness all the way down and all the way up again and it made no difference clearly it is but it wasn't showing in the readings I'm going to assume that because it has a battery the laptop has a hard time to deciding whether it wants to use that or the Main's power and so it ends up being inconsistent and weird about it because I know for a fact that the battery drops much faster when the screen is on Full brightness because obviously it will do so it has to be consuming a lot more power when the screen is on Full brightness in short from all my testing I've gathered that it's really hard to read laptop power consumption from its Main's power drawer also cuz it's plugged in it may choose less power efficient settings than where it on battery mode only it's just then I can't read how much power it's consuming can I anyway once I started doing things with a laptop it got easier to measure it watching a movie consumed about 24 wats of power downloading games on Steam consumed about 50 and a graphically intensive Benchmark like 3D Mark was 70 do note that this laptop has the worst of Both Worlds where it has a dedicated graphics card but one that's kind of rubbish why did I get this laptop I got it for this screen so I could play Heroes 3 every night sitting in bed like this and it's been worth every penny God I love that game but yeah of all the results I think the steam download wattage is the most interesting one CU I've long known it to be much more processor demanding than you might have expected as it's not just downloading stuff it's also extracting compressed data as it's going which can take a really big bite out of your processor resources especially if you have a fast internet connection next I tested this Mini PC to see how it fared I hoped it would consume less power than the laptop did but also as it's a desktop PC I figured it might be less concerned about power efficiency either way knowing how much it's consuming will be interesting because unlike the laptop's 28 watt processor this one's rated at just 6 Watts but again I suspected that that could be a lie and sure enough at 8 watts idle and 25 wats Peak usage I feel like the processor must be a bit more than six maybe as much as 15 and then of course the rest of the components are doing stuff as well but how about that a Mini PC can consume far less power than even a regular old laptop does and last I tested my main PC set up the screen itself is a hyper indulgent 32 in 144 HZ 4K HDR 1,400 display in simple terms it Nom Noms big Power in wattage terms it wasn't actually as bad as I expected as usual I found a weird Quirk with the standby mode where it would consumed 26 wat of power if the fan was still running even when the screen was off Yep this screen has a fan in it to call its g-sync thingy in the back and it often spins for about a minute after you've switched the PC off when the screen was on however in standard mode at 40 to Watts I didn't actually think it was too bad and this wattage depended on whether the screen was Black or White and finally as a special treat I turned hdr on and put on that really exciting bit in interstellar where they're docking over that blindingly white planet and I can confidently say that interstellar's music can make even staring at this wattage meter an exciting experience and my screen when displaying this scene at Peak HDR brightness consumed up to 200 watts of power though still 40 to 80 most of the time so actually this screen isn't as bad as I had anticipated but it does mean that this monitor can briefly consume more power than this TV that's almost six times the size yeses but all that power consumption is nothing compared to my main PC here are the specs if you don't know your PCS this will mean nothing to you but if you do you're probably a bit mortified right now for comparison a PlayStation 5 can consume 200 wats of power but in my PC the processor alone can consume about double that and the GeForce 490 more than double that the other stuff you find in a PC as well and you're talking lots of power and not necessarily in a good way but I have a secret back in the day you used to be able to overclock your processor to get more performance out of it these days processors overclock themselves to some extent the am4 standard max out at around 100 Watts am5 200 while with Intel these days you think it's at a limit and then they release a newer processor that goes even higher again some of them now hit like 300 or 400 watts it's all to squeeze out an extra percent or so out of the performance but at such a terrible cost of power efficiency that it's all but essential that you underclock these to a level that you can call effectively so I've set my power limits a lot lower I still get most of the performance but at less than half the original power consumption when sitting on desktop on my main PC the PC was still consuming 90 W of power now I don't know what's eating that I guess it's all just half of the course for a PC for of full size high performance parts please don't explode I then put a video render on and my PC consumed about 285 wats of power which is more than I would have liked it to consume I was expecting maybe about half of that it's not unusual for me to go full days with my PC on in this state which is roughly the equivalent of leaving a kettle on for 2 and 1/2 hours a day or the microwave for about 5 and 1/2 hours and that's even with me trying to make my PC more power efficient loading up a game like Counter Strike 2 its power consumption jumped to about 300 to 400 wats which again was a lot more than I expected it to be given that the frame rate was capped to 144 HZ at 4K so it shouldn't be stressing any of my computers components just as a reminder my PC is consuming about twice the power that plac in 5 would but we can go further still I jumped into my BIOS and removed all of the Power limits that video encoding that used to consume 280 WS would now jump between 300 and nearly 500 wats of power and that's just with my processor running the graphics card isn't even doing anything yet and so finally I put my PC to the ultimate test I loaded up cyberpunk 4K with maximum path tracing a true challenge for any PC and just for good measure I around two video encodes at the same time in the background I'm actually scared and what ensued was the most terrifying minute of my year so far as my PC alone spiked between 750 and nearly 900 WS of power add to that my nearly 200 W screen and we're talking almost the power of a microwave simply to entertain you for this video am I the sort of person to care about power consumption yes because I pay for it and cuz I live in England where electricity is really expensive but I also care about it because I do hate waste even this minute I spent stress testing my PC felt so incredibly wasteful yeah that's nothing compared with the decades I've been using PCS for already and the thousands of hours I've left them idle for blissfully unaware of just how much power they're consuming these days there are alternatives I could be getting by on my Mini PC most of the time or playing most games with a 30 W steam deck or I could just be using a 200 W console instead yet here I am right on the cutting Edge where I like to be but I'm paying the price for it in just about every way imaginable and to think it's just as well I upgraded my power supply for path Trace cyberpunk with rendering in the background maybe I can justify this display of excess once in a while but now that I'm armed with the data I am going to go to efforts to try and be more energy conscious and to start using my Hardware in Greener and more sustainable ways and the first sacrifice I'm going to make is to start playing a lot more Heroes 3 in [Music] bed

Channel: 2kliksphilip

Views: 115,148

Keywords: 2kliksphilip, game, 3kliksphilip, review, nostalgia, tech

Id: P-ZrKH_7h2g

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024