Power Consumption

[drtekrox]

Is Valve doing some sort of Crypto Mining with their new client?
Having the main Steam library window consumes ~90 WATTS OF POWER.
That's not a typo.

From a Kill-A-Watt here, at idle I'm using about 118 watts, with Steam client window open in my Windows VM, power consumption is ~210watts at the wall.
This is only with the client window open - if the window is closed and steam is in the background, it sits at idle voltage.

However, the new Steam Client tries to open the window whenever possible, you close it, leave it for 2 mins and it'll open right back up again.

Valve - why are you stealing my electricity for your personal gains?
Is the 30% not enough?

[Zaskar]

Nah mate, I got a tour of Valve's HQ and I manage to sneak up to their development room and installed a Bitcoin miner in your update just for you. Sorry.

[drtekrox]

Originally posted by Zaskar:

Nah mate, I got a tour of Valve's HQ and I manage to sneak up to their development room and installed a Bitcoin miner in your update just for you. Sorry.

H A C K E R M A N

Originally posted by fauxtronic:

Steam > Settings > Interface > Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views.
Does unchecking that setting make a difference?

That actually did help, went down from ~210watts to ~140watts - still using 20 watts to show the steam library, but it's better than 90.
Firefox with 20 tabs open doesn't consume that much...

I should add this is only for the Steam Client for Windows.
i can leave the Linux client open in the background without issue.

[Shotgun]

Power usage isn't linear; even something that requires very little processing power by itself can wake up various idle components of the computer's architecture. That said, having GPU rendering turned on doesn't seem to make Steam use more resources when idle, for me personally.

Try playing around with your computer's power settings to see if you can move the threshold up a bit?

Could also just be an effect of your particular hardware/OS/driver setup.

[Muppet among Puppets]

Is that consumption reflected in % usage in task manager?

I thought it was too far fetched to bring ecological complains into the discussion of the new library.
Your discovery is worse than what i guessed.