Cost to run a gaming PC (and console): per hour, per year

Gaming hardware is a mid-weight appliance: a gaming PC drawing 350-500 W under load costs roughly 7-12 US cents or 7-10p per hour at average rates, a games console at 150-250 W costs about half that, and either way a serious 3-hour-a-day habit lands in the region of 8-14 dollars or pounds a month - less than the household's second fridge, more than its fans. Price your own rig through the electricity cost calculator - wattage shows in the GPU's spec or any monitoring tool.

The honest session maths

Not all gaming hours are equal: competitive shooters and ray-traced blockbusters push the whole system, while strategy and indie titles may draw half. Monitors and peripherals add 20-50 W. The console's fixed hardware makes it the cheaper per-hour machine by design - it also throttles less and idles better, which matters more than most players expect (below).

The idle problem

The real cost leak is not the gaming hours - it is the other 21. A rig left on overnight, monitors awake on the desk, the PC on but "resting" at 80-150 W: that base load can quietly match the gaming load itself. Sleep settings (display off at 10 minutes, sleep at 30), shutting down for the night, and checking what the machine draws at idle are the whole fix - the meter-test method in the standby audit works identically on a desk. Consoles: enable their rest-mode power caps rather than leaving them fully on.

Trimming without losing frames

Frame-rate caps (capping at 60 or 120 rather than uncapped) cut GPU draw substantially for a barely-noticeable trade; quality presets that drop 10% of the visuals save double-digit watts; and undervolting - for the comfortable - reduces power at the same performance. None of this turns gaming expensive or free: at pennies an hour, the hobby remains one of the cheaper ways to spend an evening - the point of the maths is that the idle hours, not the play hours, are the ones worth fixing. For the summer footnote, a hard-gaming room in a heatwave adds to the cooling load in the AC maths.