How Much Electricity Does A GPU Mining Rig Use?
17th May 2020 
Josh Riddett
A really common question we get asked is how much electric does one of our devices use?
“I’ve heard they use loads of electric, they’re dead consuming and it’s going to cost you a fortune. A lot of those misconceptions come from the Bitcoin mining sector rather than the GPU sector. Yes the rigs are on 24 hours a day but as it stands at the moment, one of our devices, a standard rig a six card device uses roughly one kilowatt of power consistently. To put that in perspective a vacuum cleaner or a hairdryer might be about 2,000 watts so depending upon your electric bill this might be anything between £2.50 and £3.50 a day to run a device here in the UK on standard domestic rates.
The really exciting thing about this type of technology is that as the software increases depending upon which coin you’re mining, you’re actually able to reduce that power consumption slightly. 18 – 12 months ago the same devices were using about 1200 watts, we’re down to around a thousand as an average now. There are some coins which use even less power around the 800-850 watt mark so we expect with technology increases this is going to continue to come down and down. The reality of it is, electric consumption isn’t a massive issue.
In a domestic environment you can actually fit 16 of our gpu rigs in a UK domestic house on a normal electric circuit so it’s just not a massive concern. Ultimately for our larger scale commercial installs where people can have many many of these on large scale power stations the fact that they don’t use enough electric is one of our biggest problems.
Under those circumstances with very cheap power we can turn up the rigs to get even more performance out of them (1500 watts or even a little bit more) but in the most optimum settings for most of our applications, one kilowatt is exactly what they use on a consistent draw, 24 hours a day and ultimately that’s under the best conditions to get the best performance, the best value and the best money out of the equipment.
