So you just bought that spanking new gaming rig, ready to play the latest 3D accelerated games.  Ever wonder how much it costs you to have that PC on all day?

Let me start off by saying that there's no way of knowing how much power your PC is sucking down without having it attached to a measuring device.  That is because the PC has variable power consumption based on what you're doing with it.  You can, however, determine the maximum that it might eat up in a given time period.  All you need to do is take a look at your power supply and see how many watts it's rated for.  That gives you peak sustained power usage.

From there, it's easy to plug in values using our handy dandy electric cost formula.

Low end PCs tend to have around a 500 watt power supply.  High end PCs can have up to a 1000 watt (1kw) power supply.  Using my fascist electric company's rates, if I were to run my 650 watt PC at maximum for 24 hours a day for 30 days, it would cost me...

650w * 24 / 1000 * 0.1678 * 30 = $78.53 per month.

Yikes!  Luckily it's not as bad as the worst case scenario.  My PC is on 24 hours a day, but here are the mitigating factors:

• Most of the time, my PC is in power save mode - that means it's only sucking minimum power to "stay alive". That puts it WELL below the 650W mark.
• I only run "expensive" operations like 3D simulations or data crunching software for a fraction of the time that the PC is on
• I've got lots of ram so disk access is minimized (disk access is a mechanical operation that consumes more power)

But still... yikes!