GPU Power Consumption and Running Cost

What decides a graphics card's running cost

Three numbers set the bill, and the card's rated power is only the first of them.

Rated card power versus the whole-system estimate

Manufacturers publish a power limit — NVIDIA calls it Total Graphics Power, AMD Typical Board Power. It is a ceiling for the card, not an estimate of what the whole computer draws. The model used here assumes a demanding game holds the card at 85% of that limit, then adds 120 W for the processor, board, drives, fans and power-supply losses. Under that assumption, multiplying the full rating by your gaming hours would put the card's own energy use about 18% above this site's estimate. Across these 34 cards, the estimate for a whole gaming PC at the wall runs from 218 W with a GeForce RTX 4060 to 609 W with a GeForce RTX 5090.

Idle time and its share of the bill

A computer sitting at the desktop draws about 70 W whichever card is installed. With the default 4 hours of gaming and 6 hours idle, the idle time is 15% of a GeForce RTX 5090 machine's bill but 33% of a GeForce RTX 4060 machine's. On the GeForce RTX 4060, 12.4 idle hours cost as much as the day's gaming — a machine left on overnight gets there. On the GeForce RTX 5090 it would take 34.8, more than a day has.

The price of electricity where you are

State averages run from 13.11¢ per kWh in Nevada to 52.72¢ in Hawaii. A mid-range machine — the Radeon RX 7800 XT uses 655 kWh a year at the defaults — adds $6.55 a year for every extra cent per kWh. Your own tariff beats any average: it is printed on your bill, and every card page accepts it as an input.

Reading a card page

• Whole machine and card alone. The headline yearly cost is the whole computer. The card's own share sits beside it, because swapping the card changes only that part.
• Suggested PSU is the card maker's recommendation for a typical system. For a specific processor, the PSU calculator sizes the build from the processor's real power ceiling instead of its TDP.
• Every default is an input — electricity price, gaming hours, idle hours and the load factor — so a page can be set to how you actually use the machine.
• The state table and the series table use the same defaults, so their rows compare like with like.

Common mistakes

• Multiplying rated power by hours. It prices the card at its limit rather than a gaming load, and leaves out the rest of the computer.
• Forgetting idle time. On a GeForce RTX 4060 the hours at the desktop are 33% of the bill at the defaults, and a machine left on all day spends more on idling than on gaming.
• Using the national average. The same machine costs 4.0 times as much to run in Hawaii as in Nevada.
• Treating the load as fixed. A frame cap or a lighter game lowers it. At 70% load instead of 85%, a GeForce RTX 5090 machine spends about $24 less on electricity a year at the national average.

Where to go next

• Open any card below for its cost in every state and against the rest of its range.
• PSU wattage calculator — what supply a whole build needs, processor included.
• Local LLM VRAM calculator — which open AI models a card's memory can hold; 13 of these cards have their own page.
• Console running costs — for scale, a PlayStation 5 draws 200 W while playing, less than the 218 W of the leanest gaming PC here.
• Methodology — the formula, the defaults and the sources in full.