How Much Power Does My PC Need? | Breakdown of the Main Components Requirements

Knowing "how much power does my PC need" is a must if you have a PC. It helps you to get how your electricity expense is counted, or choose the best components for your PC to maintain it in the long run without spending excess cash on unexpected defects.

Through this article, I will show you how much power a PC needs in five different crucial components of a computer and some recommendations to reduce the amount of energy it uses. The same power consumption requirements stand for laptops under 100 or under 1000 dollars.

Let’s kick right in!

How Much Power Does My PC Need?

Power usage of a PC is dependent on its hardware and how often you use it. Here are some facts that I’ve experienced.

Some research has proven that a PC that uses a large amount of energy is always used constantly. Conversely, if you use your computer to surf the Internet or use available functions once or twice a day, it will need less power compared to intense use.

We can conclude that a PC for gamers needs more power than a PC for officers or students. But if you leave your PC overnight without using, unfortunately, the power it needs is equal to a used-all-day computer.

Not working on your PC too much but it still keeps draining power? Keep reading! I will bring you some information and facts that may blow your mind about the amount of power your PC needs.

Which PC parts use the most power?

There are five main parts that drive your PC to draw the most power. Most of it is parts of hardware like CPU, GPU, etc. Hence, if you pay attention to how much energy your PC needs, I'm sure my words below are worth reading to you.

Five components I've mentioned include:

CPU
GPU
RAM
Data drives
Power supply

The average power that the CPU uses is about 55W to 155W, and GPU uses is about 250W to 300W. Both are the high amount of power that drives your PC to draw the most energy.

The power supply needs 130W to 600W, depending on what kind of PCs. This device is very crucial because it passes power to the entire components in your PC, so it uses the most amount of energy to operate.

Other components like RAM (uses 2 to 5.5W), data drives (15 to 27W) use the amount of power not as much as CPU, GPU, and the power supply. But, it's still an alarming amount.

The keyboard, fan, case lighting, or mice use no more than 0.5W, so it's not a problem for us.

If you are willing to spend cash on power-efficient hardware, I highly recommend it for you. Handsome is as handsome does.

Even though these five components are challenging to fix and build for muggles desiring to use their PC intensely but economically, it's still worth examining.

Is the affection of these five components on the power your PC needs is difficult to digest? Stay tuned and keep reading! I will bring you some temporary tips to lower the power of your PC needs.

How can you reduce power used by your PC

If you are low-tech and don't want to spend much money on your PC to make it less power-consuming, I will show you some essential tips to decrease your PC's power use temporarily without much effort.

Here are my recommendations. Let's check them out!

Turn off the loudspeaker if you don't need it
Turn on the Sleeping mode if you temporarily don't use your PC
Turn off the Wifi function or unplug with the Internet to reduce the power used by your PC
Adjust for automatically turning off the screen after five or ten minutes without using your PC is the most trustworthy way you can do to reduce the energy your desktop uses
Screensavers don't help much in lowering power consumption
Adjust the screen brightness of your PC. The producers always set it to the highest light, and it's a power-consuming thing that makes your PC need more power
Turn off your PC if you don't use it. It's the best way for you to maintain your PC workflow in long-term use