When it comes to just about any device, we probably turn them off when we’re done with them. I don’t keep the oven on forever just in case I need to pop in an emergency pie. You probably don’t keep your telly on 24/7 either, bathing your front room in a static glow for eternity. PCs are a little bit different though. They’ve morphed into the hub through which we can do practically anything.
We all use our PCs for gaming, of course, and they’re great as an entertainment hub for just about anything, whether that’s to watch movies, listen to music, browse the web, learn dangerous cult-like lessons from misinformed YouTubers, mess around with Ableton, or whatever the heck you want to do. Then there’s all the work and practical uses. We can use them to keep in touch with everyone we know, do our work, or print out essential memes.
PCs are the hub around which a huge part of our lives revolves these days. And, when you accomplish just about anything on one, we obviously want to be able to use them at the drop of the hat. It’s why many of us never turn our gaming PCs off at all. They whirr on continuously, ready for that moment when we might need them.
But, obviously, keeping your PC on permanently comes with its own downsides. For one, you’re going to be using more electricity. It might not be much while idle but it’ll gradually be sipping juice and that adds up over the course of a year. For those who have their PCs in their bedrooms as well, seeing their PC lit up like an RGB nightmare probably isn’t conducive to the best night’s sleep either.
There’s also the conflicting arguments over whether turning your PC off might even be bad for its health. Leave it on and you’ll be putting the components through more wear and tear, turn it off and the boot process could deteriorate the components. At this point, I don’t even know what’s best anymore.
So what’s your tactic with your gaming rig? Are you ardent turn-offer, or do you leave it blinking away forever? Do you take advantage of sleep mode or is it all or nothing? Let us know what you do and why below!
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It's simple I sleep
My PC sleeps =)
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Ofc i turn it off,why not?
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I turn it off every night or if I'm not going to use it for a while.
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Yes, I heard that too, that turning off and on too often will cause damage to our hardware over time.
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I mean sure a electrical surge when you power on must definitely be causing damage but i'm pretty sure they must have figured out a way to completely overcome the issue the by having the PSU or Motherboard chips take the surge head on regul
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regulate it and then pass on only whats necessary and safe. If I was a chip designer that'd be an important thing I work on (I'm not a chip designer and definitely not that smart. I am a Sci Fi Writer so please correct me if I'm wrong)
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mobo's since awhile ago have really good ESD protection even if you directly shock them with static electricity the most you can damage is a usb port on the IO. Now 20 years ago yeah that was a different story also all motherboards as far as i know have extra esd protection under those screws that hold the mobo in case
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But PSU's dont get the same treatment especially the cheaper units. Shock those and they are likely to blow up/set fire. The more high quality units have grounding built in with good ESD protection but they can still die as the worst case scenario but they wont damage other components usually.
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I thought too much of turn on/off will wear the disk in HDD (boot drive). hence, 'm usin' SSD boot drive.
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killing the power on your PC while its on can damage your HDD (not necessary that it be a boot drive even secondary) if it is in between a Write Process but normal shut downs and boot ups shouldn't be an issue SSD are mainly suggested for B
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boot as the benefit of the fast read result in a quick boot. Sata SSD can boot at about 8-15 seconds and M.2 NVME can boot as fast as 2 seconds flat. smaller applications can load up super fast as well but in case of games depending on the
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size and optimization you might just get a few percent faster load times as games arent really optimized for SSD since its costing that comes as a negative factor but With Next Gen about to get SSD games with ssd optimization is expected to
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come in so a 15 second load time can be cut down to as low as 0.8 seconds as rumored by the PS5 hardware so with SSD cost super low you should consider an upgrade but remember go for a M.2 NVME SSD x4 with 2 key marks not just one
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I believe this is non-issue. Like yes, if you want to keep your hardware for more than decade it might be an issue, but you will likely upgrade a way before. Plus if you are that worried, you maybe would want to stop gaming, since stretching and shrinking of hardware when it gets hot and cools down also contributes to wear and tear. On second thought, you might want to never turn it on at all...
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What I am trying to point out is, people overreact, they make mountain out of a mouse. All hardware will inevitably fail. So I would say this is not an issue, it is just more of people looking for excuses to keep their PC on 24/7 and don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with that. But as long as you don't turn it on and off like 10 times per day,...
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... but if you do it once or twice, it won't really be a problem. Hardware manufacturers do expect that and they do make sure it is safe to do so. And if that was issue, how come we have so many working Comodore 64s or Amiga PCs, or those old Macs, you know how come retro stuff survived to this day and yet, PCs today are somehow super sensitive to it.
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It's probably one of the biggest bull****s you've ever heard. We can still use computers manufactured in the 80's without any issue. Just boot them up!
By the time the hardware dies, probably more than 3 generations of humans would pass. I wouldn't worry about your computer's lifespan, especially since people pretty much upgrade a whole system within 10 years.
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cant argue with that I did change my entire system in about 7-8 years would've done it at the 5 year mark but had to wait for ryzen to launch as 5 years later I was struggling to play quite a few games (previous pc was a budget one though)
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that being said I would always run Crysis1W23 (my personal benchmarks)after a Complete format rougly every year and a half (when I had a string of HDD fail every 3-6 months) I saw a noticeable dip in Framerate (all settings maxed at 1080) i
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it never went up but i did notice a gradual reduction. nothing was ever documented other than me boasting to my friends in mail that i can run crysis at 63 fps during the island assualt by us forces gameplay cutscene finaly at 42fps
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so modern pc does see some drop in silicon performance for sure
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obviously leave it on overnight while downloading with my turbo 300KB/s speed
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Nope. Even my Notebook runs 24/7, i maybe restart them every 2-4 weeks, depending on if Windows starts to get buggy....
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My pc when idle wastes 200w, when cpu at 100% but gpu idle 350w, when gpu at 100% but cpu idle 400w, both at 100% 530w
When idle 200x24 would be 4.8kwh minimum dialy, here the kwh is 0.166375€ tax included so about 80 cents per day, 24.75€ monthly or 297€ yearly
So no, also it's harder to sleep with the pc
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These numbers make no sense your CPU at max consumes 125W and your GPU 150W not sure how you got 530W combined only a 9900k and 2080ti would shoot numbers up like that. Pretty sure you arent idling at 200W download HWinfo and check again your numbers make no sense. at most you are using 275W on synthetic load.
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That 530w number is just a max that is not realistic use, but it did happen, because I was hitting both the cpu and the gpu with furmark, to know the watts I didn't use any software, I used an energy meter, that's exactly what it said, the cpu is overclocked and it has disabled the ability for the cpu clock to go down
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I gotta mention that the pc has disabled the ability to decrease cpu clock because of overclock stability and that I have 6400w of solar panels with a 5.5kw hybrid inverter and 7.2kwh of batteries to store it for the whole house so we pay WAY less electricity like this, even with all ACs on at max it can handle it easy
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Folding@home 24/7 except for driver updates.
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I always turn off my PC when not using it.
My tablet is on 24/7. It's far easier to replace if leaving it on destroys it
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My tablet after 3 and half years decided to die the amount/importance of data lost man I feel like an IdioT for not backing it up on the cloud. sure work is maintained on the PC but my accounts were handled on my tab 17 days to rebuild it
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Don’t see why, or whats the point of keeping my computer on when I’m not using it, as it takes me less than 6 sec to turn it on with SSD.
It won’t save me time to keep it on, only costs me more in form of electric bill. So I always turn it off before I go to bed.
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Never
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YES... That's whats beautiful about SSD's.
It turns on and off in only 10 sec.
Tho' i still have nightmares of my Celeron RIG back in the 2004.
That thing needed shamans hex to start.
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I wish mine was that fast. SSDs only help with Windows loading - when you have a complex mobo with a lot of stuff plugged-in - POST alone takes forever. Windows loading speed is waaaay faster than POST on my main rig. My other stuff, like laptops and Windows tablets take no time to POST, for example.
So it really depends on your PC.
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Aye totally agreed Sata ssd takes about 22 seconds to start up looking at NVME m.2 SSD x4 I am super tempted to bite the bullet and grab it before prices begin to rise and bring down my boot times any idea how fast it can get with the M.2?
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M.2 drives are snake oil for normal use (non-server, non-scientific and for non-dataset usage - basically nothing that normal people ever do). I have them and I went back to SATA boot because of larger capacities. M.2 will NOT speed your Windows boot time any more than maybe half a second over a decent SATA SSD.
Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3AMz-xZ2VM
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I measured my 970 evo plus boot time multiple times and the lowest time i got was slightly above 8 seconds and from my memory the 860 evo boot time was about 14 seconds. This difference is minimal some games load up to 10-20 seconds faster this heavily depends on the game engine but most of the time you wont notice it.
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Unless you open huge winrars or do some large file work you wont notice the massive "speed" the m.2 carries on the numbers for example 50-100GB winrars open under a minute vs SSD's 5-10 minutes everything installs faster etc etc. Here a review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXN0IqENqAw not worth it for general use imo
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My laptop starts up so fast that windows messes up at the password screen. An x4 drive was a great buy. Standalone games load up so fast, updates are faster because of the more efficient drive. I've realized that other hardware is the limiting factor lol
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I have a gaming laptop. I'll turn it off if it's not going to be used for hours. This laptop is pretty quick on startup, though. My previous laptop could take minutes to run properly due to the hard drive and less impressive innards.
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Quite honestly it depends on the build and use case. My gaming/editing rig is a power hungry monster, runs water-cooling and running 24/7 is not good for a watercooler's longevity. In addition, I don't want my dad paying more than he has to for the electric bill. I also believe that running a system 24/7 does decrease it's lifespan unless it is specifically built for that purpose....like a server. Speaking of which, I do run a server with AIR cooling that i run 24/7 that is a bit less hungry.
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I have a gaming rig I built April 2011 that has been running 24/7 w/o issues since. My wife now uses it and it's still running great.
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My latest build pretty much runs 24/7 for the past three years, and I've never experienced any issues.
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I leave my computer on, I shut my monitors off at night though.
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Only when i seed to a 5-6 + ratio.Otherwise - no.I have a pretty good dl speed (around 13 MB/s ) and i don't need to worry about game size.
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99% of the time it goes to "sleep" every night
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If you own an SSD, shutting down is not a problem because you can turn it back on in a couple of seconds everytime.
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That is only really the case if you have a simple MOBO without much attached to it. Try my PC on for size - 5 SSDs, 3 HDDs, 2 GPUs, 1 PCIe expansion card, 1 SATA Express expansion bay, a complex mobo (Rampage V Extreme), optical audio DAC, USB audio interface, a bunch of other USB stuff... POST itself takes its sweet while (much longer than Windows loading) ;)
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I think you pay half of the electricity bill on it xD
Do you really need all of these?
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Wouldn't have 'em if I weren't using them, would I..?
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I didn't realize you had so much connected. Now I don't feel so alone haha
4 ssd, 2 hdd, wifi card, USAF network USB attachment, scanner, printer, 3d printer
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ive once had i turned on for a day or 2 and my 16gb almost got completely cached.