Really good question! Never had a problem; so never thought to test it. My GUESS is that it will not sleep.

@Qoncussion please test; would be a nice contribution to the forum.

Hmmm... Sounds like a test is in order. I'm currently troubleshooting a different issue where my PC is locking up when left idle... Need to figure this one out first :)

I never let any of my computers go to sleep. I have had many issues in the past from this.

I never let any of my computers go to sleep.

Same here. I let the screen switch off after 20 minutes but that doesn't affect any rendering or downloading. All computers I've had over recent years have a sleep button on the keyboard so it's been easy to manually put them into sleep when I want to.

Yeah, I'm kind of a 'set it and forget it' guy. I like knowing, when I go to bed, or away for a day or two that my system isn't unnecessarily burning up power and resources.

Anyhoo ~ I believe I have answered this question .. I just set my computer to sleep after 1 minute, and started rendering a project in VP15. I'm 3 minutes in, and the computer is still rendering. No sleep after 1 minute.

I have a feeling that the sleep timer will start after a render has completed. I would test this further right now, but other things are running that cannot be interrupted by a sleep cycle.

@Qoncussion … re:

I'm currently troubleshooting a different issue where my PC is locking up when left idle...

I recently had something like that occurring on an older desktop computer, and found a tip on a forum somewhere that a possible solution was to remove the RAM memory, give the connections a gentle clean (I used compressed air), and then re-seat the memory. Happily, this worked - now no more locking up.

Yeah, I'm kind of a 'set it and forget it' guy. I like knowing, when I go to bed, or away for a day or two that my system isn't unnecessarily burning up power and resources.

Under such circumstances it's probably best to switch it right off. I've had Windows wake itself when it's supposed to be sleeping.

@Qoncussion … re:

I'm currently troubleshooting a different issue where my PC is locking up when left idle...

I recently had something like that occurring on an older desktop computer, and found a tip on a forum somewhere that a possible solution was to remove the RAM memory, give the connections a gentle clean (I used compressed air), and then re-seat the memory. Happily, this worked - now no more locking up.

Thanks for the tip - but I think I finally figured it out. I had taken the machine apart, cleaned the memory chip fingers using a pencil eraser (yeah, it works wonders) plus a little contact cleaner, then finish it off with a light buffing. I cleaned the contacts in the memory slots. I took my Radeon R9 290X video card apart and put a fresh layer of Arctic MX-4 Thermal Compound on the GPU. Then, did the same with my 8-core processor where it connects to my Corsair radiator, and yet - it still locked up, but only when left idle. So I examined the system logs and found a driver was displaying a critical error before each freeze, "BTHUSB". About a week ago I found an old Bluetooth dongle and thought, Hey, wouldn't it be nice to use my BT headphones with my computer. Well, it "appears" (still not 100% sure - but I am 99%) that was the problem. So far - so good. :)

Yeah, I'm kind of a 'set it and forget it' guy. I like knowing, when I go to bed, or away for a day or two that my system isn't unnecessarily burning up power and resources.

Under such circumstances it's probably best to switch it right off. I've had Windows wake itself when it's supposed to be sleeping.

I too have had that happen. Most often, you just need to tell the network card to wake on Magic Packet only. Windows will wake the computer when any traffic crosses the ethernet cable if this option is not selected. Sometimes, it's another device that auto-wakes the computer. Mine sleeps soundly when it's down, but I also have a scheduled event to wake it at 7:27pm every night, just before it's 7:30 back-ups run. That's one of the advantages of using sleep over powering down. At the end of the day, I know that my external drives (4 of 'em) contain everything of value to me as a backup. I live in Northern California where the fires run rampant this time of year. If we have to evacuate - as we've nearly had to do on more than one occasion, I just grab that external drive box and run. :)