I find it interesting that I'm becoming increasingly more efficiency focused as I get older, and I'm considering basing my next big upgrade on efficiency as well as performance (which was never a consideration for me a few years ago). My hardware is getting long in the tooth and despite being considered efficient for X58, it's still not a patch on the newest systems. As I type this my rig is pulling 125W at the wall; working in Photoshop usually pulls around 200W, and power draw when gaming is obviously through the roof thanks to the 780Ti. I'm just curious how many of my BTF comrades power down their rigs at the end of the day or use other energy-saving measures like sleep, hibernate etc. I typically switch my PC on in the morning and leave it on until I go to bed, and if I'm away for extended periods I usually switch the displays off but leave the PC running. I suspect that if I got myself a rig that had very low power draw at idle I'd be more inclined just to leave it on 24/7. Discuss and share!
My desktop and laptop are always in suspend-to-RAM when I'm not actively using them, which uses very little power. My HP MicroServer, though, is always on, as are a few other low-power single-board computers dotted around the house for various purposes (energy monitor, doorbell, pooled DHCP server for when the MicroServer's down, that kind of thing.)
I only power on my PC when I'm actually using it. To be fair, it only gets a few hours' use per day, and typically in contiguous blocks.
I used to leave my PC on pretty much all day, but more recently I have it set to go to sleep after a fairly short period of inactivity. My microserver, on the other hand, hasn't been turned off in months.
After having a couple of mobos die in recent years I have stopped leaving them on all night. I've tried sleep, but on pretty much all of my rigs it doesn't work properly. Maybe a bios setting? not sure.
My PC boots in about 10 seconds so I see no reason to leave it on. I do have a freenas box on permanently, though.
Mine are either on or in sleep mode. Still on Socket 1366 in my main system and Socket 775 in my other one. I tend to avoid shutting down now as the bug in Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware beta still hasn't been fixed so can take anything up to 30 minutes to shut down. The bug/feature in the nVidia drivers means I also have a long pause when booting up while it apparently does sod all but delays it by up to a minute.
Use to have my main rig on 24/7, as it ran my RAID array, but in early 2015 I switched to a low power Celeron J1900 box (/w single 8TB drive + OS SSD) running Hyper-V, that serves media and runs my FreePBX server. Runs like a champ and pulls only 35W from the wall (could probably improve that if I had a more efficient PSU).
I have a file server that is on 24/7 for obvious reasons. Selected low power hardware, but the HDs negate most of the savings. HTPC running Linux, is also on 24/7 but mainly because I never got the RF power switch to work under Linux. Selected low power hardware, the system is fanless. Windows machines I power down this includes work laptop and my Surface, I find windows just works better with regular reboots. The iMac I just let it sleep. Wife's computer gets left on. Holy crap I have too many computers...
I forgot, I leave my Sumvision Cyclone Mini PC permanently on and connected to my TV together with a portable USB hard drive as my media server. However both the PC and hard drive use no more than 15W when fully loaded.
I am in the no camp on this one. I turn my pc off by the wall socket router printer,TV the lot off at night. I only turn it on when I need it My pc boots fast , save money on electricity.
Also a Nope here, seeing as my bed is in the same room as it and I can't stand any light source when I'm trying to sleep; It goes off. Startup time is sufficiently short that I'm usually not bothered by it anyhow. I'd only leave it on overnight if i'm in the middle of something important, bulk file backups or conversion, for example.
I live in a shared house and don't see an electric bill. My PC and 3 servers stay on all the time. I don't think any of my computers in the last 7 years have been off for more then couple of hours.
For those of you who don't leave your rigs on 24/7 - why so? For me it's as much force of habit as it is a common-sense energy saving measure... but in actuality what difference would it make to my annual electricity bill? (I really should sit down and work it out.) Despite my best efforts (enabling speedstep, C-states, etc.) I cannot get my rig's idle power draw below 100W... in fact it seems to be steady at the 110W mark. Spreadie - I'm curious what your rig's power draw is (if you have that info available). I've considered a side-grade to a GTX980 because it's far cheaper than getting a 1060 or 1070 and I'd be happy with roughly 780Ti performance without the requirement for a nuclear reactor.
