How Much Does It Cost to Run a Gaming PC?
About $10.36 a month — $124.28 a year — for a RTX 4070 build drawing 356 watts under load, played 4 hours a day at the 2024 average rate of $0.16/kWh. An hour of gaming costs 6.2¢. The graphics card decides how high the number goes; the 16 hours you are not at the desk decide what you actually pay. Pick your card below.
Your graphics card
Board power as published by NVIDIA and AMD. Picking a card sets the wattage below by adding the rest of the system and dividing by power-supply efficiency.
The whole tower at the wall — not the number on the graphics card's box.
16 hours left asleep.
Gaming PC cost per month
$10.36
64.7 kWh at $0.16/kWh — $124.28 a year, monitor included.
An hour of gaming
6.2¢
356 W + 30 W monitor
Gaming's share of the bill
73%
idle is 24%, sleep 3%
Sleep saves, per year
$89.70
vs. leaving it awake those 16 hours
386 W × 4 h gaming + 130 W × 4 h idle + 4 W × 16 h asleep = 2.13kWh a day, × $0.16 × 365 = $124.28 a year.
Idle draw
What the machine pulls sitting at the desktop. Measured at the wall — a power supply is far less efficient at idle than under load, so this is not derived.
Monitor
Lit whenever the PC is awake, asleep whenever it sleeps.
What it does the other 16 hours
Sleeping instead of idling through those hours saves $89.70 a year — 3% of this bill is the machine asleep.
Graphics-card figures are the board power NVIDIA and AMD publish for their reference designs — a specification, not a measurement, and a card that is not the bottleneck in a given game will draw less. The gaming wattage adds an assumed 120 W for the CPU, board, memory, drives and fans under load, then divides by 80 PLUS Gold efficiency to get what your meter sees. Idle and sleep are wall figures. A plug-in meter will tell you what your own machine does. Not sure of your rate? Check average rates by state.
How much electricity does a gaming PC use?
A gaming PC has three wattages, and it spends most of the day in the cheapest one
Roughly 100 W idle at the desktop, 261–633 W under load depending on the card, and 4 W asleep. Which of those owns the other 16 hours of the day matters more than which card you bought.
Worked example (RTX 4070, 4 h gaming, 4 h idle, $0.16/kWh): 386 W × 4 h + 130 W × 4 h + 4 W × 16 h = 2.13kWh a day × $0.16 × 365 = $124.28 a year.
Monthly cost at common electricity rates
Rows are graphics cards. Columns are what a kilowatt-hour costs where you live. Every cell assumes 4 hours of gaming and 4 idle, a 30 W monitor, and 4 W of sleep for the remaining 16 hours.
| Graphics card | Idaho$0.10/kWh | US average$0.16/kWh | California$0.28/kWh | Hawaii$0.39/kWh |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 4060261 W at the wall | $5.38 | $8.51 | $14.82 | $20.61 |
| RTX 4060 Ti311 W at the wall | $5.99 | $9.48 | $16.52 | $22.97 |
| RX 7600317 W at the wall | $6.06 | $9.60 | $16.72 | $23.25 |
| RTX 4070356 W at the wall | $6.54 | $10.36 | $18.05 | $25.09 |
| RX 7800 XT426 W at the wall | $7.40 | $11.72 | $20.42 | $28.39 |
| RTX 4070 Ti450 W at the wall | $7.70 | $12.19 | $21.23 | $29.52 |
| RTX 4080489 W at the wall | $8.18 | $12.95 | $22.56 | $31.36 |
| RX 7900 XTX528 W at the wall | $8.66 | $13.70 | $23.88 | $33.20 |
| RTX 4090633 W at the wall | $9.95 | $15.75 | $27.44 | $38.15 |
State rates come from the rates by state page. The worst case in this table — the RTX 4090, in the most expensive state in the country — is $38.15 a month.
Gaming PC wattage by graphics card
Every graphics card ships with a published board power — TGP at NVIDIA, TBP at AMD — and it is the most useful number you have. It is not, however, what your meter sees. The card sits in a machine that also runs a CPU, memory, drives and fans, and all of it is fed by a power supply that loses some of what it draws as heat. The wall figure is the card, plus the rest, divided by that efficiency.
| Graphics card | Board powerpublished | Whole PC at the wallunder load | An hour of gaming | Per month4 h a day | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 4060NVIDIA | 115 W | 261 W | 4.7¢ | $8.51 | $102.08 |
| RTX 4060 TiNVIDIA | 160 W | 311 W | 5.5¢ | $9.48 | $113.76 |
| RX 7600AMD | 165 W | 317 W | 5.6¢ | $9.60 | $115.16 |
| RTX 4070NVIDIA | 200 W | 356 W | 6.2¢ | $10.36 | $124.28 |
| RX 7800 XTAMD | 263 W | 426 W | 7.3¢ | $11.72 | $140.63 |
| RTX 4070 TiNVIDIA | 285 W | 450 W | 7.7¢ | $12.19 | $146.23 |
| RTX 4080NVIDIA | 320 W | 489 W | 8.3¢ | $12.95 | $155.34 |
| RX 7900 XTXAMD | 355 W | 528 W | 8.9¢ | $13.70 | $164.45 |
| RTX 4090NVIDIA | 450 W | 633 W | 10.6¢ | $15.75 | $188.98 |
At the US average rate of $0.16/kWh. Board power is the vendor specification for the reference design — a factory-overclocked partner card may be allowed more, and a card that is not the bottleneck in a given game will draw less all evening. The wall figure adds an assumed 120 W for the rest of the system under load and divides by 90% power-supply efficiency; the monthly and annual columns include the 30 W monitor.
The most expensive card in the table costs $86.90 a year more than the cheapest
The RTX 4090 pulls 3.9 times the board power of the RTX 4060, and costs $188.98 a year against $102.08. The gap narrows because a graphics card only draws its rating for the hours you are actually playing — 4 of 24 here — and the CPU, the drives, the monitor and the other 20 hours of the day do not care what is in the PCIe slot. Whatever the argument for a smaller card is, the power bill is not it.
Why the power supply's rating is not a wattage
A 850 W supply does not draw 850 W. That number is the maximum DC it can deliver, and a sanely specified unit spends its life at half of it or less. What the supply does do is take a cut: 200 W of card and 120 W of everything else is 320 W of DC, and an 80 PLUS Gold unit pulls 356 W from the wall to supply it — about 36 W of pure heat into your room. That is the only part of the PSU that is on your bill.
Idle vs. gaming: where the bill actually comes from
Gaming is 73% of this machine's bill, idling is 24%, and sleep is 3%. That last number is only small because the machine is asleep. Leave it awake instead, and the 100 W it draws doing nothing runs for 16 hours a night rather than 4 — which is how a computer nobody is using becomes the most expensive thing about owning one.
Sleeping when idle
$124.28
a year
Never sleeping
$213.98
a year — 72% more
One setting is worth
$89.70
a year, for free
Sleep is worth more than the difference between the cheapest and the most expensive graphics card
Letting this machine sleep through the 16 hours you are not at the desk saves $89.70 a year. Trading its RTX 4070 for the RTX 4060 — a materially slower card — saves $22.19, and the whole span from the RTX 4060 to the RTX 4090 is $86.90. Those two numbers are the same size, and only one of them costs you any frames. Buy the card you want; set the machine to sleep after fifteen minutes.
What the machine draws when you are not playing
| Idle draw | Typical of | Cost a year | If it never sleptawake all 16 hours | Sleep saves |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 W | Lean build, one drive, nothing lit | $112.60 | $155.58 | $42.98 |
| 70 W | A well-behaved mid-range desktop | $117.27 | $178.94 | $61.67 |
| 100 W | Assumed default — typical gaming build | $124.28 | $213.98 | $89.70 |
| 150 W | High-end CPU, several drives, fans and lighting | $135.96 | $272.38 | $136.42 |
A RTX 4070 build, 4 hours of gaming and 4 idle a day, at $0.16/kWh. Idle figures are what a plug-in meter reads at the wall, not a derivation — a power supply is far less efficient at 100 W than under load, so the 90% above does not apply here. Sleep is 4 W, in the same territory as the other appliances that drain power when off.
Power-saving modes, in order of what they are worth
Enthusiast advice about gaming PC power almost always starts with the hardware — undervolt the card, buy a better supply, cap the frame rate. All three work. All three are worth less than the sleep setting you already have, and it is worth checking the arithmetic before spending anything.
1. Sleep after 15 minutes idle
$89.70/yrFree, reversible, and wakes on a keypress. It is the whole game. Set the monitor to sleep after five minutes and the machine after fifteen. If you leave downloads running overnight, wake-on-LAN and scheduled wake will still do what you want.
2. Cap the GPU's power limit to 80%
$10.51/yrA power limit is a hard cap on board power, so 80% of a 200 W card is 160 W and cannot be exceeded. Undervolting reaches the same place by a different road. Capping frame rate does it indirectly — a card rendering 60 frames instead of 200 is not working as hard, and stops asking for the power. Do all of this for the heat and the fan noise, which are real. The money is a rounding error.
3. Upgrade the power supply
$8.41/yrThat is the entire span from 80 PLUS Bronze to 80 PLUS Titanium — every rung of the ladder, on this machine, for a year. A new supply costs many years of it. Buy a good one when you are buying one anyway; do not buy one to save electricity, for the same reason it rarely pays to replace a working appliance with an efficient one. See old vs. new appliances for how that payback maths usually lands.
| GPU power limit | Board power | Whole PC at the wall | Per year | Saves |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100%stock | 200 W | 356 W | $124.28 | — |
| 90% | 180 W | 333 W | $118.90 | $5.37 |
| 80% | 160 W | 311 W | $113.76 | $10.51 |
| 70% | 140 W | 289 W | $108.62 | $15.65 |
A RTX 4070 (200 W board power) played 4 hours a day at $0.16/kWh. A power limit caps board power by definition; what it costs you in frames depends on the card and the game, and on most cards the top of the power curve buys very little performance. Every row still sleeps for 16 hours — which, at $89.70 a year, is worth more than the whole table.
Where the power supply's efficiency lands
| 80 PLUS rating | Efficiency at 50% load | Whole PC at the wall | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 80 PLUS Bronze | 85% | 376 W | $128.95 |
| 80 PLUS Silver | 88% | 364 W | $126.14 |
| 80 PLUS Gold | 90% | 356 W | $124.28 |
| 80 PLUS Platinum | 92% | 348 W | $122.41 |
| 80 PLUS Titanium | 94% | 340 W | $120.54 |
80 PLUS certifies efficiency at 20%, 50% and 100% load; the middle figure is quoted here because it is roughly where a sensibly sized supply sits while gaming. The spread across the whole ladder is $8.41 a year on this machine.
Should I shut down or sleep my gaming PC?
Either. The gap between sleeping and shutting down is a few dollars a year; the gap between either of them and leaving the machine awake is $89.70. This is the rare standby question where the honest answer is that standby is not the problem — the 100 W desktop you walked away from is.
| The other 16 hours | What that means | Per year | vs. never sleeping$213.98 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 W | Off at the wall, or a switched power strip | $120.54 | −$93.44 |
| 2 W | Shut down, board still powered | $122.41 | −$91.57 |
| 4 W | Assumed default — suspended to RAM | $124.28 | −$89.70 |
| 8 W | Sleep with wake-on-LAN and lit peripherals | $128.01 | −$85.96 |
A RTX 4070 build at $0.16/kWh. Sleep draw is not published by anyone and depends on what your board keeps powered — 4 W is an assumption in the middle of a plausible range, and the conclusion does not move anywhere in that range, because every row of this table beats staying awake by an order of magnitude.
Every watt of it comes back as heat
The 356 W your machine draws while you play does not leave the room. In winter that is a space heater you were running anyway. In summer your air conditioner has to carry it back outside, and an hour of central air conditioning costs several times an hour of gaming. If the room is warm, a ceiling fan is the cheap answer. And if you want to know what is genuinely expensive in your house, the gaming PC is not near the top of the list.
Related Guides
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much electricity does a gaming PC use?
A gaming PC uses about 100 watts sitting idle at the desktop and 261 to 633 watts while you play, depending on the graphics card. A RTX 4070 build — the mainstream choice — draws about 356 W at the wall under load. Played 4 hours a day, idle for another 4, and asleep the rest, that is 64.7 kWh a month, or $10.36 at the US average rate of $0.16/kWh. An hour of gaming costs 6.2¢. The card on the box is not the number that bills you: a 200 W card sits in a machine that also runs a CPU, drives and fans, and a power supply that wastes about 36 W turning wall AC into DC for all of it.
How much does a gaming PC cost per month?
About $10.36 a month — $124.28 a year — for a RTX 4070 build played 4 hours a day at $0.16/kWh, with a 30 W monitor and 4 W of sleep. That is 64.7 kWh, of which 73% is gaming, 24% is the machine awake but idle, and 3% is sleep. At the lowest state rate the same machine costs $6.54 a month; in Hawaii, the priciest state, $25.09.
Does leaving a gaming PC on all night cost a lot?
It is the single most expensive habit on this page. Leaving the machine awake through the 16 hours it would otherwise sleep takes the annual bill from $124.28 to $213.98 — 72% more, or $89.70 a year, for a computer doing nothing. Idle draw is only 100 W against 356 W of gaming, but it is 100 W for four times as many hours. Sleep costs 4 W and wakes on a keypress; there is no good reason not to use it.
Does an RTX 4090 cost much more to run than an RTX 4060?
Less than you would guess. The RTX 4090 draws 450 W of board power against the RTX 4060's 115 W, but a whole machine on the same schedule costs $188.98 a year against $102.08 — a difference of $86.90. The card only draws its rating for the hours you are playing, and the rest of the machine and the rest of the day do not change. Letting that machine sleep instead of idling overnight saves $89.70 a year, which is more than the entire gap between the cheapest and most expensive card here. Electricity is not a reason to buy a smaller card.
Does capping frame rate or undervolting the GPU save money?
A little. Both work by keeping the card below its power limit, and a power limit is a hard cap on board power — set it to 80% and the card cannot exceed 160 W. On a RTX 4070 played 4 hours a day that takes the year from $124.28 to $113.76, saving $10.51. Capping frame rate does the same thing indirectly: a card rendering 60 frames instead of 200 is not working as hard, so it does not ask for as much power. Both are worth doing for heat and noise. Neither is worth doing for the money — the sleep setting is worth $89.70 a year and costs you nothing at all.
Does a more efficient power supply lower my bill?
Marginally. A power supply converts wall AC into DC and loses the difference as heat, so its efficiency really is on your bill — a 200 W card and 120 W of everything else is 320 W of DC that an 80 PLUS Gold unit pulls 356 W from the wall to supply. But the whole ladder from 80 PLUS Bronze to 80 PLUS Titanium is only 9 percentage points, worth $8.41 a year on this machine. Buy a good supply because it is a good supply. It will not pay for itself, on the same arithmetic that decides whether replacing a working appliance pays for itself.