Are components with high power draw an issue for you?

[swirl09]

Honestly, 9 out of 10 polls I take on TPU I either dont think any answer applies, or I pick the least popular one ^_^;

 

[Sithaer]

Yes it does matter to me and in my household in general, I was already accused of using a lot of power with my 'gaming' PC so I had to buy a power meter to check that for real.
I draw the line around 200-230W on the GPU, rest is no big deal since I'm only using/buying budget-mid range parts that don't draw much like my current i3 or my previous 1600x.

I even undervolt my GPUs out of habit + less heat/noise and also limit my FPS to my monitor's refresh rate which is only 75Hz so I'm not pushing my hardware for no reason.

Currently my PC draws around 250W while gaming and thats about fine with me.
O ye I don't have AC in my room and my room gets hot enough during summer, last thing I want is another space heater.

 

[Solid State Brain]

I'm not particularly concerned if I can use available power limiting algoritms and options to curb heat output and increase efficiency to my desired levels, and that's what I am already doing with my i7-12700K despite having also overclocked it. By default these CPUs can operate for prolonged periods at frequencies/voltages where they are not efficient, but they can be fairly efficient at lower power levels.

Reviewers should collaborate as well by introducing tests performed at limits more compatible with everyday usage with standard cooling systems. It's useful to know what components can do without limits and unlimited cooling, but real-world usage may have different requirements.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

My current GPU can consume 450w that is about the limit that I would feel comfortable using. A 12900k at about 240w wouldn't bother me but I still prefer the 135-145w my stock 5950X caps out at though. I currently keep my thermostat at 70F/21c in the summer and my computer room still can sit at 75-76F while I game and that really is the limit of what feels comfortable to me. I guess if this trend continues I will have to move my gaming pc out to the living room which I would very much prefer not to do.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Heat not really bothered as i have good cooling. Power same, my PC can only use as much as the size of my PSU can't it, and it will never use the max 750w for hours on end, so not really bothered. Major concern is noise.

 

[lordmogul]

My main concern with power draw is that I pay my own bills and everything that gets put into the computer is less on the table.
Back in 2016-ish I went with a GTX 1060 over a RX 580 for that exact reason. I did the math on purchasing and running cost with my use and electricity rate and the 580 would draw so much more power that by now the total cost would be closer to a 1080 than a 1060!
Environmental concerns are another factor, but we're in a hobby that is consuming quite a bit anyway.

 

[ThrashZone]

Honestly, 9 out of 10 polls I take on TPU I either dont think any answer applies, or I pick the least popular one ^_^;

Hi,
Not to worry in this poll 2 and 5 are the same group of people so just add them together and you're a winner winner chicken dinner

 

[JayEe]

I have to heat my house somehow anyway, so it's not issue for me.

 

[caroline!]

I chose heat.
Man, try to live on tropical country with ambient temp 30c all year round without AC and there is no way you could gaming even with the 500W regular PC stuff. Let alone with 500W just for the GPU only

I don't try, I just do it got used to hot weather and 90% humidity, the components can take it but at the cost of being noisy af, I don't mind noise either because I'm running Delta fans on my PC to keep temps low lol, earbuds filter most noise out.
Environment isn't under my control, having energy saving parts won't do anything when the power plant is burning coal and pouring thick black smoke and ashes into the air 24/7.

The bill though. One of the reasons I don't have an A/C.

 

[Sabotaged_Enigma]

I'd actually choose all yes's for heat, power bill and environment... And I think those four yes's are talking about the same thing since high power consumption results them all.
The least I mind is noise.
I don't know which direction our hardware is going but I do hope power consumption be in a reasonable range. Isn't it ridiculous if I had to buy the lowest-end one which serves me better than a radiator?

 

[maxfly]

Not a bit. I don't run my main rig often enough to make a dent anymore( no time). Even if I still had time, nope. Wced with a way overkill loop that doesn't allow my ambient temps to increase more than a few degrees. My old lady keeps the house at 66f year round so I really need to get off my ass and upgrade my rig to something uber hot to keep from freezing to death.

 

[Batou1986]

I just generally think the power draw of modern GPU's is absurd, brute forcing your way to higher performance with 500W doesn't really strike me as innovation.
Also this poll should have been multiple choice because heat noise and power consumption all important to me.

 

[cvaldes]

This poll should have been multiple choice and Yes (power bill) really should have been Yes (total cost of ownership). It's not just the electricity (which is money) but also the initial cost of the component and any ancillary parts (like a waterblock for a custom cooling loop or an amply specced CPU air cooler). Even extra case fans to reduce overall system heat.

Like some others here, my primary gaming build isn't the only computer I own. When I'm not gaming, it's usually turned off and I'm using something else. When I am gaming at least I'm getting some sort of benefit from thing (4K Ultra gaming at 120 Hz).

It's worth pointing out that noise is certainly applicable to devices with less power draw. I have a cheap notebook PC (an Acer ultralight) and of all of the computers I own, this thing has the most annoying acoustics when doing a Handbrake encoding due to the whiny fan. The same Handbrake job on my daily driver PC (Ryzen 3700X) is very quiet due to the 140mm AIO cooler for the CPU.

My guess is that the total power necessary for both encodes is about the same. Either I do it more quickly on the more power hungry Ryzen desktop computer or I suffer through a longer job on an Intel notebook with unpleasant acoustics. Or I can let my Intel Mac mini handle it (which still has an audible fan).

 

[Cutechri]

Yes, for all of them. If power draw keeps going in this fashion, I no longer care about PC gaming.

 

[caroline!]

I just generally think the power draw of modern GPU's is absurd, brute forcing your way to higher performance with 500W doesn't really strike me as innovation.
Also this poll should have been multiple choice because heat noise and power consumption all important to me.

They're just releasing cards for the sake of pumping up the numbers at this point, so lazy devs don't even care about optimising and polishing 3D engines and APIs anymore, not to mention most AAA games are just reskinned clones of older games (CoD, sports games, etc.) or released before being finished due to PR pressure.

PC industry is becoming the new smartphone industry where software faults are "fixed" by adding more cores, more RAM and more storage (and more cameras?!) in order to mitigate the awful performance programs have for at least a year or two, spend a grand in a phone and think it's great? fat chance, it'll be obsolete in 18 months because even a chat program sucks half of your RAM and there are so much background processes running that it ends up lagging like my internet in a multiplayer game. Instead of that, PC industry just pumps more power into the components to keep up with buggy software.
Higher clocks and more power to keep up with tiny IPC and single-core performance improvements in CPUs, dumb amounts of power into graphics cards to overclock them as much as possible to keep up with steady framerates in unoptimised games, it's like having a car with all 4 flat tyres and asking the mechanic to install a better engine with more HP to go faster.

 

[kiriakost]

Yes (power bill) + Yes (heat) = we are winning the chart

 

[TheUn4seen]

I wish it was a multiple choice poll. Personally I care about the power bill - as an adult I have to pay those myself and I much prefer paying less; more heat means more noise which annoys me to no end and also, during the summer, means more time the AC has to be on, which affects both the power bill and noise pollution. Furthermore, since nuclear power is still not as ubiquitous as it needs to be for the society to move forward, environmental concerns also play an important role. Hence, there should be sixth option, "answers 2, 3, 4 and 5 are relevant to my situation".

 

[Mussels]

Yes (all)

Go get two systems, a 12900KS and a 5600x

Look at the hardware required to run each.
How much performance gain do you get, vs the bigger PSU, bigger CPU cooler, and bigger case to accomodate them? How much heat does that vent into your room/house, that requires extra cooling?

A hair dryer uses 500W on low settings, why the heck would i want that blasting into my room?


(Then of course, theres the longevity/lifespan issues - throw in an AIO and its extra fans, more case fans, etc, and theres more to fail, that will fail faster)

Hi,
Anyone buying these or even a 3090 wouldn't care about any of the issue listed heat would be as simple spending more on a top end water block.

For myself personally price pretty much kills any chance of 3090ti/ 3090 and rog boards would have to drop a lot before I'd do the platform as a whole cpu price really doesn't bother me nor does any mentioned issues all would be custom water cooled anyway.

Not true, mostly.
(Well kinda true, and fits what i said above. I had to get more case fans to deal with it on air, and then had to get custom water to keep the memory under 100C)
I got the 3090, waterblocked it... and then undervolted and underclocked it.

At the lower clocks its insanely power efficient and still incredibly powerful, it's 10% more performance for 100W as they pass the efficiency curve

 

[simlife]

In the last weeks we've seen the release of GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and Core i9-12900KS. Both use tons of power, to achieve small performance improvements.

Is this something that concerns you?

no why would it? they are older tech using older less optrimized parts(amd is lower nm in 2020) if you can afford the best tiny cost to a electric bill will mean nothing... i know tons of ppl who drive trucks with 30+% less fuel efficiency then my car and aggressively (aka speed more so having to break more for slower cars in front or obvs red lights..) cry about gas prices.. just today a truck speed past me just when a one lane turned to 2 when i was going 5 mph over the limit only to cut back because he had to turn... i guess he saved about 2-3 seconds... rather then sit behind me and he wasted gas and part of his breaks to do so.. for about 3 seconds...

if your money concise you would look at that like i do nickel and diming yourself every time you drive but they dont a person who bought that card a extra 800 bucks over a 3080ti for very little performance and tons of more electricity over 2-5 years is either rich or stupid... if your conerned about high average end gamers why? 8k is stupid with ppi.. basiic math at any screen size and the steam servey shows the 1060 as the most common gpu a gpu from 2016 we dont need to push past certain thresholds yet

 

[hat]

Yes, for a lot of reasons. Power bill and heat are two concerns. I'm not so sure a few thousand gamers running high power GPUs is going to be any more destructive to the environment than supporting the grid already is, but pushing the power higher and higher to eke out a few more frames isn't exactly efficient. I don't think we'll see efficiency come back until one of the players falls behind and the other can just refine the existing architecture, or make new ones more focused on efficiency rather than raw power.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

How can anyone (no offense Mussels) say they are bothered about heat or power use and have a 3090, even undervolted and underclocked. Like saying damn petrol is so expensive when you own a 6 litre powered car, which you are not gonna drive like your granny or why bother buying it.

If you are an enthusiast and own a high powered PC you are already in the special power user category. Me, i dgaf as long as my PC is quiet. I run my 12700k stock ( lol no need to OC it ) and my 1080ti is not exactly a guzzler. The cost of Electricery is going up, imo tough, we have to pay it or sell your high end PC, which i am not gonna do.

no why would it? they are older tech using older less optrimized parts(amd is lower nm in 2020) if you can afford the best tiny cost to a electric bill will mean nothing... i know tons of ppl who drive trucks with 30+% less fuel efficiency then my car and aggressively (aka speed more so having to break more for slower cars in front or obvs red lights..) cry about gas prices.. just today a truck speed past me just when a one lane turned to 2 when i was going 5 mph over the limit only to cut back because he had to turn... i guess he saved about 2-3 seconds... rather then sit behind me and he wasted gas and part of his breaks to do so.. for about 3 seconds...

if your money concise you would look at that like i do nickel and diming yourself every time you drive but they dont a person who bought that card a extra 800 bucks over a 3080ti for very little performance and tons of more electricity over 2-5 years is either rich or stupid... if your conerned about high average end gamers why? 8k is stupid with ppi.. basiic math at any screen size and the steam servey shows the 1060 as the most common gpu a gpu from 2016 we dont need to push past certain thresholds yet

There is imo a lot of un admitted epeeners in the enthusiast users

 

[Mussels]

How can anyone (no offense Mussels) say they are bothered about heat or power use and have a 3090, even undervolted and underclocked. Like saying damn petrol is so expensive when you own a 6 litre powered car, which you are not gonna drive like your granny or why bother buying it.

Cause i get more power for the same wattage?
In many games this uses less power than my 1080 did, because i'm not running unlimited FPS here?

Edit: Dying light gameplay, UPS reading (monitor included)

 

[TheDeeGee]

Yep, heat and noise.

 

[ppn]

I'm willing to settle for 299 W CPU and 599 W GPU, that can be undervolted to lower the power expense if needed, but that is the absolute limit. Above that Im building my own solar array on the roof, and water loop with dual 420 radiators running at very low rpm./

 

[ThrashZone]

Yes (all)

Go get two systems, a 12900KS and a 5600x

Look at the hardware required to run each.
How much performance gain do you get, vs the bigger PSU, bigger CPU cooler, and bigger case to accomodate them? How much heat does that vent into your room/house, that requires extra cooling?

A hair dryer uses 500W on low settings, why the heck would i want that blasting into my room?


(Then of course, theres the longevity/lifespan issues - throw in an AIO and its extra fans, more case fans, etc, and theres more to fail, that will fail faster)


Not true, mostly.
(Well kinda true, and fits what i said above. I had to get more case fans to deal with it on air, and then had to get custom water to keep the memory under 100C)
I got the 3090, waterblocked it... and then undervolted and underclocked it.

At the lower clocks its insanely power efficient and still incredibly powerful, it's 10% more performance for 100W as they pass the efficiency curve

Hi,
See you made my point people will think outside the box so most issues can be tweaked to mean little to nothing

Most issue is just simply cost of hardware not utilities.....