What does a gaming PC cost to run?
A powerful desktop under full load draws more than a fridge. Play for a few hours a day and it becomes a line on the electricity bill worth knowing about.
Typical model is rated 400W
Price cap is 26.11p
10p per hour, 1,095 hours a year, 438 kWh in total — about £10 a month.
A gaming PC's draw is set almost entirely by its graphics card, and only when it is working. Browsing or idling, the same machine sips 60–80 watts; mid-game with a high-end card it can pull 400 watts or more. So the honest figure depends on what you actually do — hours of demanding games cost real money, light use costs very little.
The cheap wins are a frame-rate cap, so the card stops rendering hundreds of frames no screen can show, and enabling the machine's sleep settings so it is not drawing power overnight. A monitor left on adds to it too — worth counting alongside the tower.
The short answer: Cheap when idling, genuinely thirsty under load. A frame-rate cap is the easiest saving.
What actually helps
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This is the small stuff
Every appliance on this site put together is usually less than a third of a typical energy bill. Heating the house is the rest of it. If the numbers here bothered you, the number that actually matters is what your heating costs — and whether a heat pump would make it better or worse in your particular house.
Work out your heating costOther appliances
Energy figures checked 2026-08-26. Electricity priced at the Ofgem cap for 1 July – 30 September 2026. Your own machine and tariff will differ — put your figures in above.