this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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Fuck AI
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1kWh 3hrs playtime. Not on gaming PC of today. Only my 32" 240Hz display itself consumes more than that.
That is a choice. My desktop setup, including speakers and monitor, uses below 140 W at full load in games, for 4060 levels of performance. Yes, your system is likely faster but I can play all modern games with it, at a level that is good enough for me. And I don't sit in a sauna while gaming as a consequence. In other words, for that 5 sec AI video I can play 7 hours on my system and that does not even consider the tons of energy spent on training the model.
Yeah. I know. I also have that kind of setup for my kids. Or actually theres 5 gaming setups alltogether. Mine isn't primarily for gaming despite the specs.
I just wanted to point out that gaming PC setups generally consumes more than ~333W of power.
Like yours. Given numbers are estimated averages, as I can't know precise specifics.
GPU 140W, CPU 65W, MB ~35W, RAM 6W, SSD 3W, KBM 1W, Monitor 35W =280W Everything without monitor consumes about 245W. PSU efficiency is about 80% so to produce that 245W it has to draw minimum of ~306W. This combinrd with monitor's 35W sums up to ~341W, which already surpasses that 1/3kWh when playing intensive game from few years back.
And your 4060 setup while being a gaming PC isn't on a power draw scheme very average as that GPU specifically is very low power consuming. Go older, 3000 or 2000 series or up 5000 series or even any AMD, the power consumption goes up. And there are lots of older setups and even X99 setups with Xenons with up to 125W power consumption.
Yes, it is possible to have a gaming setup to run on given power consumption, but on average I would say you'll reach 1kWh within 2 hours.
I have to correct myself. The 140W were the desktop system. With everything included (screen etc) I just checked and had a power draw of 166W at the power outlet. Those aren't TDPs, that is the actual power draw including PSU losses and it is also the max draw, it doesn't really get higher than that. My system is only 4060 like in performance, it is actually a Strix Halo with an integrated 8060s, with a combined CPU+GPU TDP limit of 100W. That has the advantage that I basically have no VRAM limitation (in Indiana Jones: The Great Circle I saw pretty continuous 12 GB memory used by the GPU) at the downside of limited bandwith, still quite close to a 4060 but much lower than high end GPUs of course.
Yes, my system is absolutely not representative. It was one of my goals to get an as energy efficient setup as I could while getting the necessary performance to be able to play modern games.
On modern gaming PCs 500W actual power draw during gaming does sound possible, on my previous system which had a pretty similar performance, but with dGPU (6750 XT). There I had a power draw of roughly 280-300W without the screen, during gaming, if I remember correctly.