I'm more radical than that - my line (currently) is at 250 W. My Seasonic Prime Ultra Platinum 550 W is the best PSU I've ever had and it's still well within warranty thanks to Seasonic's amazing warranty policy (10 years for Focus, 12 for Prime). It wasn't too cheap, either, so I'd rather not buy another one just because Intel, nvidia and AMD decided to go balls to the walls with performance. 200 W for CPU, 250 W for GPU and 100 W for everything else, including a little safety headroom should be enough.
I'm quite radical with PC size, too. I love mini-ITX systems, even though I have a micro-ATX one at the moment, which is the biggest size I'm happy with. Full towers with lots of unused expansion slots are a thing of the past, imo. I also don't like how they look. I know, one needs the space for airflow, but all the void inside makes the case look empty and bigger than it really should be - kind of the same way people buy SUVs for going to the supermarket once a week. My PL-unlocked i7-11700 and RTX 2070 are kind of the maximum of what I can comfortably cool in this size.
Well that is a matter of perspective 250W vs 400W sure it is a difference but like some people suggest going for 600W or higher (which if we keep this course of action will happen) is ridiculous and saying, you dont have to buy it is just plain stupid. Also saying, you can downclock it and save power is even more ridiculous in my opinion since you pay for performance of the card. So you will pay shit a lot to get 250W obviously slower card. Not good.
I have a 6900XT and you may argue about the power it uses but the fact is, it doesnt use a lot. I really dont go across 260W ever. It's not OC'ed but it doesn't have to be either.
But you are just WRONG. They are not raising the power usage to achieve better performance. Of course it is all rumours at this point, but the 4090 is supposedly almost twice as fast as the 3090. So yeah, a 20% consumption increase for a 100% performance increase is an insane efficiency jump. I don't understand how you do not get this.
They are raising the power usage. You said it yourself 4090 will use 600watts. How is that not raising power consumption for the cards? It will be faster no doubt but the power for a card is almost 3 times higher than it used to be.
Yes it is almost twice the 3090 and each of those cards had power draw up. Each generation the power draw goes up. Are you blind or something?
1080 Ti card only power draw 231W
2080 Ti card only power draw 273W
3080 Ti card only power draw 356W
All gaming only.
Don't even try to tell me it's just the way it is or it performs better because that is simple bullshit. Power goes up despite how fast it is and now you will get 4090 with power of 600w. Get 4080 TI with power 550W that is terrible no matter the performance. The power goes up for all the cards and that is illustrated clearly by TPU's reviews. each gen power draw for the same card segment goes up.
4090 600w twice performance of a 3090 350w still shit a lot of power consumption for both cards. NV has been upping the power needed for the cards exponentially every gen. Obviously the 3090 TI uses even more so then they will compare 4090 to a 3090 Ti with a power draw of 450 and it will not seem so bad. But if you look across generations of cards it sucks so bad.
Edit: To stay on topic, Alder Lake is said to be super efficient too, but if that efficiency comes at 200+ Watts, I couldn't care less.
Some people are just blind to see this. You can't boost the power over and over just because the efficiency is there. That just a dead end and for the companies they are slacking in delivering a good round product.