The price of electricity in Spain is completely out of control at the moment. Every watt that we can save of electricity positively affects the electricity bill which arrives at the end of the month. The RAMvery possibly, is causing you to pay more on your electricity bill and has a very simple solution.
We have seen a Nexthink report on energy consumption of computer equipment. According to the report, they have analyzed more than 3.5 million computers. About 34% of analyzed systems take more than 5 minutes to boot. This is a high energy consumption that is not doing any useful work. And the main culprit for this boot delay is RAM.
RAM memory is causing your electricity bill to be higher
It may seem a bit surreal that the RAM memory of our computer is generating a gap in the electricity bill. The reality is that it possibly affects more than we can imagine.
Within the study it is indicated that a fifth of the teams analyzed were more than three years old. These systems took little time to start up, they were powerful systems with good efficiency. But they have come across many really slow systems. After analyzing them carefully, they have detected that the main problem was in the RAM memory.
They found that 80% of the old systems tested had extremely slow boot times. As indicated, we are talking about more than 5 minutes at startup, something that exceeds any logical parameter.
After further analysis, 98% of these systems are significantly improved by upgrading RAM. In addition, some configuration adjustments have been made to reduce the times.
The analysis highlights above all that these slow systems are generating 450 tons of CO2 annually. To give us an idea, this is equivalent to the emissions that would be generated by just over 190,000 liters of gasoline.
Something as simple as changing the RAM (upgrading it) and making some adjustments in the BIOS, boot times are reduced. This means reducing electricity consumption and, consequently, CO2 emissions.
Other tips to reduce consumption and CO2 emissions
If we have an old computer (let’s say 5 years old) and we see that its performance declines, it is still perfectly useful. In addition to RAM, we can change the storage unit. It could be the case that we have a mechanical hard disk (HDD), in that case, it is advisable to change to an SSD. SSDs have much higher read and write speeds than HDDs, and also consume much less.
For those with a more modern system, there are a few adjustments that can be made to save on your electricity bill:
- Turn off the RGB LED lighting of all components (whenever possible)
- You can reduce the working frequency of the processor and even disable some cores
- You can reduce the frequency of work of the graphics card if you are going to play light titles such as Fortnite, Minecraft or LoL; among others
- Instead of putting your computer to sleep, turn it off completely
- If you have a laptop, when the battery is fully charged, unplug it and use the battery
