Well, some new systems (newer than any of mine) have a deeper sleep mode available where they really appear to be dead. I support the normal "Monitor Sleep" and "Hard-Drive Shut-Down" functions which can be set in Display Properties. The program is still running in the background, but should not generate any signals which would wake up the monitor or drives.
This assumes that you have enough RAM. I could imagine situations where the program might need to page textures back and forth to the hard drive if RAM were extremely low. This might be enough system activity to keep the monitor on. I've never tested for low-RAM behavior.
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