A question about power usage

[OrangePulp]

I'm starting to look at building myself a computer for gaming, and I'm probably going to go for a 500W power supply. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. The thing is, I tend to leave my computer on for things like Bit torrent, or maybe because I forgot to turn it off, or I'm lazy, whatever, and that's a lot of power to be using when I'm not doing much. Obviously, I could just turn it off, but are there ways to run it using less power when I'm not using much proccessing power or my graphics card? Or does it do this automatically?

I know that I might not even use all of my power supply, depending on what I have installed, but power isn't free and if I could save some money on my electric bill in the future, maybe I could afford more on computer parts now.

 

[m3trj]

The computer will only use the power it needs. So if you have a 500W PSU, then it's probably not using all that. And in games you'll be using more than just on the Windows desktop probably.

 

[flurobmx]

If your computer has a standby button just hit that wen your finished using it and hit it again wen you want to use it again, standby uses less power

 

[Tro1086]

Your computer only uses the power it needs. Just because u buy a 500W power supply dosnt mean its always using 500W... When your just doing stuff like surfing the net or something thats not using much of your computer, its not consuming very much power. But when your in games and the processor and graphics card are working hard, thats when it will use more power. When your not using the computer its not using very much power at all. And turning your monitor off probably saves more on the power bill then turning the computer off, instead of letting it idle.

Its like when you drive a car, it dosnt just constantly use the same ammount of gas, its fuel consumption depends on how hard/fast you are driving. If you are driving nice and easy you can get just as far on 1 gallon of gas as you can get on 3 gallons if you drive it real hard.