I’m in the process of getting my Home Assistant environment up and running, and decided to run a test: it turns out that my gaming PC (custom 5800X3D/7900XTX build) uses more power just sitting idle, than both of my storage freezers combined.
Background: In addition to some other things, I bought two “Eightree” brand Zigbee-compatible plugs to see how they fare. One is monitoring the power usage of both freezers on a power strip (don’t worry, it’s a heavy duty strip meant for this), and the other is measuring the usage of my entire desktop setup (including monitors and the HA server itself, a Lenovo M710q).
After monitoring these for a couple days, I decided that I will shut off my PC unless I’m actively using it. It’s not a server, but it does have WOL capability, so if I absolutely need to get into it remotely, it won’t be an issue.
Pretty fascinating stuff, and now my wife is completely on board as well; she wants to put a plug on her iMac to see what it draws, as she uses it to hold her cross-stitch files and other things.
It will help some, and will also help temps, but AMD hardware does well with undervolting, especially the 5800X3D. I undervolt mine, and read the consensus that - 30 across all cores should be achievable for anyone, unless they’re really, really unlucky. My 6800 XT I also only run @ 92% Voltage, and it runs cooler and faster now, too.
Definitely gonna check that out.
The CPU was done in BIOS on an ASUS x570. For me it was under AI Tweaker > Precision Boost Override > Curve Optimizer.
The GPU was done in the driver software on Windows. Or LACT if on Linux.