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09-08-2024
I've recently been noticing that my power bills have been getting pretty silly. I haven't changed my patterns of use except maybe leaving my desktop on when I go to sleep. I keep my AC at 74F during the summer and 69F (nice) in the winter. It just feels like my bills have gotten a whole lot more expensive for very little use change outside of... bum bum bum... climate change.
We've been reaching record highs, weather related natural disasters in places that normally wouldn't have them, and more of them in places that do normally have them. It's getting a little silly out there. But, that's not the point of this little, "thinking out loud," blog post. I have a few ideas on how I can reduce my electric usage and one of them is getting rid of this big powerful computer I'm writing this from.
A few months ago I had to RMA my motherboard and was going to be down for a week or two so I bought a refurbished HP Victis Laptop from Microcenter. This laptop had the following specs: Intel Core i7 13700HX (1.5GHz) Processor, 32GB DDR5-4800 RAM, and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Graphics Card. All the while running on a 200W power brick.
Meanwhile my computer at home has a Ryzen 7 7800x3d, 32GB DDR5-6000, and RX 7800XT. The biggest differences I could really find between using them was that in gaming I could run everything well enough on the laptop where my desktop could run everything at epic settings and that the power usage was about double if not more doing it. Are the shiniest graphics really the only thing that matters when computing?
A friend came over to stream on twitch with me and I played on the laptop just to see how it was when playing competitively. In Fortnite I was maxing out the framerate on the display with the laptop. No glitches, no stutters, no nothing. It worked great. We played some other games and it worked great as well. So, I started thinking, maybe I should get rid of this thing since I've already kind of replaced it with a laptop.
The idea is that I can have my cake and eat it too. If this laptop can do the most demanding tasks like streaming, video editing, and gaming, then I shouldn't have a need for the power hungry PC, right? Well this is the last thing I do on this PC for a week. Updating this before unplugging it and seeing if downsizing is right for me.
I have some other ideas on what I need to reduce on and I'll start working on them shortly.
My home server doesn't need to be as powerful as it is. It's running on an old office machine and does serve a lot of purposes but one thing it doesn't need to serve is as a NAS. I'm one guy. I can just plug in some drives when I need them and move to "cold" storage for my long term storage. I'll have to make another post with what's running on my home server(s). Which I should maybe think about what data I am holding onto and reduce my need for storage. Though I do have a ton of old video and field recordings that I should maybe offload somewhere to share for free creative commons uses. I'm not using it.
So, here's to a week with only the laptop.