this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

but the power usage could easily be 250W+

I mean, a beefy GPU could be ~400W, and a beefy CPU another ~200W. But that's peak draw from those components, which are designed to drastically reduce power consumption if they aren't actually under load. You don't have to power down the components in sleep/hibernation to achieve that -- they can already reduce runtime power themselves. One shouldn't normally have software significantly loading those (especially after a reboot). If you've got something that is doing crunching in idle time to that degree, like, I don't know, SETI@Home or something, then you probably don't want it shut off.

The reason fans can "spin up" on the CPU and the GPU when they're under load is because they're dissipating much more heat, which is because they're drawing much more power.