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I was surprised at how much energy my always on desktop machine uses. I’ve set it to sleep now, and host my desired vms/containers on an intel NUC. 20w vs 200w idle!

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Same here. My NUC eats around 18W when idle, which translates to ~58 Euros a year in electricity costs. (serves mostly as a NAS for Plex) 10x that in costs would be quite significant, and my desktop idles easily above 100W. (Ryzen 5 3600 and GTX 1650Super)

When I'm productive, I get to around 0.5-0.8€ a day of electricity costs with the PC, and gaming for just a few hours occasionally puts me above 1€/day.

My real killer is lab machines. It’s not worth it to pay more for more power efficient machines with a lot of RAM, but it is worth it to automate turning them on and off when I’m done! I’ve noticed a pretty big reduction in consumption having things sleep or shut themselves off.

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