PC Components with High Power Draw an Issue for an Overwhelming Majority of Users: Survey

[zlobby]

Honestly, when corporations and the planets richest people tell you as an ordinary person who probably earns 30k a year, to not buy high end computer parts or put your heating on in winter, wear 2 jumpers etc then you know you are being dry shafted, these very people swan about in private jets, have multiple homes dependent on the time of year, and likely contribute many more times your carbon footprint a day, but yes, my 500w PC and having warm water and the necessities is contributing to climate change

I know a guy's jacuzzi draining more electricity than my entire household. When I asked him was he needing this exact model, he said 'Yeah, who cares?'
Most rich people are very dumb.

 

[InVasMani]

Yup. And People Complained about the 290/X then but praised the 980 which was hotter and drew more, hypocrites.

According to TPU.

290X's 290w
GTX 980 Ti 250w
GTX 980 165w

Maxwell was a efficient architecture generation Pascal extended it steps further in terms of performance per watt, but at a bit higher TDP envelope. Every generation after has pretty much done similarly except the TDP envelope keeps getting pushed exponentially higher.

 

[AusWolf]

Personally, I'm trying to find the best compromise between performance, heat, noise and power consumption in a small SFF case with two slots for a graphics card. I expect the RTX 4060 or 4070 (or their AMD/Intel equivalents) to be the ideal solution for me. I hope with some confidence that these cards will deliver tremendous performance compared to older gen GPUs at a reasonable TGP, temperature and noise level. I personally enjoy building to such a compromise since it involves a lot of research and some ingenuity.

I guess it depends on how small form factor you go, and where your tolerance level towards noise is. I have a Corsair 280X case, and even a 2070 is kind of borderline for me. I mean, cooling is OK, but the noise... not to mention that my idle CPU temp also dropped noticeably when I switched to a 6500 XT. The 4070 will probably eat a lot more and will need much better cooling than the 2070 does. If you want mini-ITX, I'd say anything above a x60 level GPU is a no-go unless you're happy with the noise of airplanes taking off in your room.

 

[Valantar]

I do not know if the "Rebound Effect Theory" can stand reality, but there where with no question ground breaking advancements made in terms of energy consumption. Just look at LED vs light bulbs, a LED consumes only a fraction of energy. And fuel consumption of cars went also dramaticly down. Heat pumps are also a groundbreaking invention.

That is somewhat true, but it's limited to fields where there are clear growth ceilings - such as lighting, as there are pretty clear limits on the usefulness and comfort of more lighting. The move from incandescent to LED has led (no pun intended) to increased lighting, but nobody wants a 20x increase in lighting in their homes, thus there is a net power cut from this even accounting for the increased lighting. (Of course the environmental cost of LED bulb production and the embodied energy of their much more complex circuitry also offsets this somewhat, especially with many bulbs being designed cheaply and run inefficiently so that they overheat and die early.)

Many if not most areas don't have such growth ceilings. At any given point it's feasible to say "nobody needs more than X computing power", but that's a moving target. As more power becomes available, more advanced programs are created to make use of this power, which in turn drives a desire for having more compute power. Couple that with the ludicrous infinite growth ideology of capitalism and you have a surefire recipe for the rebound effect being dominant.

There are gray areas too: cars, for example, has more of a squishy ceiling for how much power the average car has/needs, but some people want tons of power just because they can (even if they only ever drive their Ferrari to the club to show off). But the average power output of a car today is still much, much higher than 30-50 years ago - in part to overcome cars being stuffed with more ... stuff, making them also much heavier, but also in part to make driving more enjoyable. But cars are still an example of rebound effect, as the increase in efficiency has also led to an increase in driving, and in car sales, meaning our fuel consumption has increased massively in the same time period.

I guess it depends on how small form factor you go, and where your tolerance level towards noise is. I have a Corsair 280X case, and even a 2070 is kind of borderline for me. I mean, cooling is OK, but the noise... not to mention that my idle CPU temp also dropped noticeably when I switched to a 6500 XT. The 4070 will probably eat a lot more and will need much better cooling than the 2070. If you want mini-ITX, I'd say anything above a x60 level GPU is a no-go unless you're happy with the noise of airplanes taking off in your room.

My main PC is one of those balls-to-the-wall SFF systems, and while I have managed a good balance of performance and noise it took a lot of work and money, sourcing specialized components and configuring things very carefully. While I really like the system and plan to keep it in service for at least half a decade, I'm increasingly leaning towards moderation being an overall better approach. If I were to build a system from scratch today, I'd be going for a smaller case with a more moderate setup - something like a Densium 4+ with an RX 6600 or similar. To me, that's where the ideal balance lies - small, simple air cooled setups with minimal fuss.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

don't even know how much power mine uses, but it is very quiet, no stupid triple fan air cooler on the GPU whizzing its tits off while gaming, same for CPU. Air cooling is fine, but the fans have to spin up for max cooling. With my loop, i can have my fans pretty slow and still have better cooling than any air setup. Sure it did cost more but it is quieter and more efficient than a air setup. Bonus is it looks better too. It does not mean a big expense to change CPU to AMD either really, no more than a good new air cooler would cost anyway.

Even if i had the cash to piss up the wall, i don't think i would even want a 3090/ti, it would mean a expensive WB on top of the cost, and having my loop try and deal with the 400/450w it would make, which is probably double my 1080ti. And screw cooling one of them on air, nice blowing all that heat into the case, which my setup does not.

There are gray areas too: cars

Not forgetting America with its love of cars with hugely stupid gas guzzling 5 litre+ engines.

 

[AusWolf]

Not forgetting America with its love of cars with hugely stupid gas guzzling 5 litre+ engines.

Not just that. Why does everybody need an SUV nowadays when a small hatchback was (and in my opinion still is) perfectly fine 10+ years ago?

 

[pavle]

The motive of any manufacturer should be to make an apparatus that is the most bang per buck in every aspect and not just because of lower power usage but because of doing the most with what you have got.
Here is where the good ones are really set apart from the bad ones.

Not forgetting America with its love of cars with hugely stupid gas guzzling 5 litre+ engines.

There is nothing wrong with big engines when being properly fed, that is not pouring liquid into them (CO2 is the basis for photosynthesis, by the way).

 

[Mussels]

Imo there are some very contradictory people using PCs. "i care about high power draw" but i have a 5950x and a 3090 GPU. Gtf, how can you possibly care about power draw and use components like that?

Personally i care more about heat than power. If power use is such a big problem for you, get a celeron setup.

Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!


And i answered you in that thread as well: Because i care about the most performance per watt. Simple efficiency.


Nothing is as efficient as an undervolted 3090, giving the most performance per watt.
Nothing is more efficient than a 5800x for low threaded tasks

My RTX 3090 + 5800x 4k gaming setup (4k 72hz or 1440p 165hz, depending which screen i use) uses 300W of power, monitor included.

Heres 10 hours of Hwinfo to back that up, as measured by the UPS (which includes tower, primary monitor, and a google mesh wifi router)
(Scribbled out the min/average/current values for simplicity, since the headers were off-screen)

And of course i f*cked up and closed the window instead of minimizing, so i lost the specific values from the CPU and GPU (220W for the 3090 vs 350W stock)

 

[_Under2World_]

There’s a lot of choice for every component so you shouldn’t care about heat/power consumption. However I understand people been scare by higher power bill/environmental impact. I’m from France so I know that my electricity is low carbon and not expensive but with recent inflation it might be too much of an expense for other countries.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Is it really that big a deal, I bought and still use one of the OG guzzlers, the Vega 64, it's mined it's value at 140watts Max , folded thousands of work units at the same level and typically never hit's Max draw while gaming, with appropriate settings applied.

You don't necessarily have to hammer it.

Plus wtaf did people expect with Ray tracing, that's a whole shit load of power required to make good god rays and mirrors.

There was a good reason for pre baked lighting.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

The best thing is to not give a feck, use whatever you like, don't try and make out you are bothered by high power use. Buy whatever power guzzling components you like, what does it really matter, once we are dead it matters not to us anymore does it.

 

[Tatty_Two]

The motive of any manufacturer should be to make an apparatus that is the most bang per buck in every aspect and not just because of lower power usage but because of doing the most with what you have got.
Here is where the good ones are really set apart from the bad ones.

There is nothing wrong with big engines when being properly fed, that is not pouring liquid into them (CO2 is the basis for photosynthesis, by the way).

Good point, however photosynthesis takes Carbon Dioxide out of the air and turns it into Glucose with the help of oxygen and water (if my memory serves me correctly), unlike a 5 litre petrol engine which tends to do the opposite

 

[Mussels]

The best thing is to not give a feck, use whatever you like, don't try and make out you are bothered by high power use. Buy whatever power guzzling components you like, what does it really matter, once we are dead it matters not to us anymore does it.

Yeesh, what a hill to die on.
You're basically saying you care not for cost harm or damage, as long as it's not YOU paying.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Yeesh, what a hill to die on.
You're basically saying you care not for cost harm or damage, as long as it's not YOU paying.

Humans are parasites, me included. We have near destroyed this planet, wiped out countless species of other animals, for what. so people can have a better GPU in their rig. I am sorry but i am past caring really. Humans will not change quickly enough before it is too late. There are people with billions of dollars sitting in their accounts doing nothing, they could live comfortably on a tenth of that, but do nothing and there are a lot of these people.

I have paid believe me to be on this planet, in pain and suffering as a child, i have paid my dues. I do not drive so do not pollute like most drivers do. Would you give up your car and use a EV or Cycle to work if you could? thousands probably could but will not because they love their cars too much. Look at the people clogging roads up sat there in their cars in a jam, how many do you think turn the motor off while sat there.

The only people that matter to me now is me and my partner, who i am full time carer for, and believe me it is not easy sometimes, and it is a no rest thing, i don't get off at the weekend. Think of me wht you like, i don't give a rats, thinking bad of me does not hurt as much as a punch or getting whipped with electric cord by your father.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Yeesh, what a hill to die on.
You're basically saying you care not for cost harm or damage, as long as it's not YOU paying.

Do you work in a big firm?!.

Doing so is slightly soul destroying IF you do indeed try and limit your own footprint, as many do.

Seeing the energy, packaging, and pollution put out by your own workplace can seriously upset your senses.

I've seen a 2£ cable in two cable ties two bags and a box many times.

The lights on eternally and machines with no job to do daily just occasionally left running for years.

And then you have countries building multiple whole cities, not for people to live in, but just to invest in(China).

Yet it's always Joe public on the end of the pointy finger.

I don't disagree with what I think you believe, we should all try to be reasonable with power use, and I agree.

But it does frustrate me how public sided the arguments are, never bringing in the big players due to them hiding behind bullshit like ESG scores.

@Tigger play fair please, it's easy to point the finger at drivers if you work in home as you do, my works 30 miles away, so yeah for now car's are key for me despite me not being All about me , I do have little choice.

 

[Valantar]

Do you work in a big firm?!.

Doing so is slightly soul destroying IF you do indeed try and limit your own footprint, as many do.

Seeing the energy, packaging, and pollution put out by your own workplace can seriously upset your senses.

I've seen a 2£ cable in two cable ties two bags and a box many times.

The lights on eternally and machines with no job to do daily just occasionally left running for years.

And then you have countries building multiple whole cities, not for people to live in, but just to invest in(China).

Yet it's always Joe public on the end of the pointy finger.

I don't disagree with what I think you believe, we should all try to be reasonable with power use, and I agree.

But it does frustrate me how public sided the arguments are, never bringing in the big players due to them hiding behind bullshit like ESG scores.

@Tigger play fair please, it's easy to point the finger at drivers if you work in home as you do, my works 30 miles away, so yeah for now car's are key for me despite me not being All about me , I do have little choice.

This is exactly why every time this type of discussion comes up I try to shift the focus away from individualizing responsibility and onto ways of enacting systemic change while ensuring that ordinary people aren't made to feel like crap for trying to get by in a suffocating system that forces impossible choices onto them. The libertarian ideal of absolute freedom of choice has never been anything but a mirage - our choices in literally every possible situation are already delimited by external forces, including the circumstansial ones that affect our well-being more broadly.

Encouraging personal responsibility is all well and good up until the point where it starts making people's already difficult lives already more difficult, at which point all you're doing is shitting on people's struggles and sowing division and entrenched BS enmity. Calls for individual responsibility should always be preceded by directing demands at those with the most resources and power first.

 

[looniam]

Humans are parasites, me included. We have near destroyed this planet, wiped out countless species of other animals, for what. so people can have a better GPU in their rig. I am sorry but i am past caring really. Humans will not change quickly enough before it is too late. There are people with billions of dollars sitting in their accounts doing nothing, they could live comfortably on a tenth of that, but do nothing and there are a lot of these people.

I have paid believe me to be on this planet, in pain and suffering as a child, i have paid my dues. I do not drive so do not pollute like most drivers do. Would you give up your car and use a EV or Cycle to work if you could? thousands probably could but will not because they love their cars too much. Look at the people clogging roads up sat there in their cars in a jam, how many do you think turn the motor off while sat there.

The only people that matter to me now is me and my partner, who i am full time carer for, and believe me it is not easy sometimes, and it is a no rest thing, i don't get off at the weekend. Think of me wht you like, i don't give a rats, thinking bad of me does not hurt as much as a punch or getting whipped with electric cord by your father.

just fwiw i had a biology prof equate the planet an a living organism defending itself against human parasites. at the time it was amazon jungle/HIV (~30 years ago) basically the further we go where we're not meant to, the more things we find that kills us.

mother nature will have the last word, rather arrogant for humans to think otherwise.

personally i blame Bic's marketing of disposable lighter in the 1970s; since then it seems people think more and more that everything is disposable, making it someone else's problem. spilled over to packaging.

and i'll stop my rant there.

 

[InVasMani]

Care now or complain later.

 

[ARF]

Good point, however photosynthesis takes Carbon Dioxide out of the air and turns it into Glucose with the help of oxygen and water (if my memory serves me correctly), unlike a 5 litre petrol engine which tends to do the opposite

Well, the waste product of photosynthesis is Oxygen and probably water.
This is why planting trees is so important today.

At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum 2022 in Davos, China's special envoy for climate change, Xie Zhenhua, announced that China will respond to the initiative "Planting a trillion trees around the world" by planting 70 billion trees within 10 years to help fight climate change. According to statistics, China's forest cover and forest resources have been steadily increasing for nearly 30 years, representing more than 25% of the world's added green space.

 

[Steevo]

This is exactly why every time this type of discussion comes up I try to shift the focus away from individualizing responsibility and onto ways of enacting systemic change while ensuring that ordinary people aren't made to feel like crap for trying to get by in a suffocating system that forces impossible choices onto them. The libertarian ideal of absolute freedom of choice has never been anything but a mirage - our choices in literally every possible situation are already delimited by external forces, including the circumstansial ones that affect our well-being more broadly.

Encouraging personal responsibility is all well and good up until the point where it starts making people's already difficult lives already more difficult, at which point all you're doing is shitting on people's struggles and sowing division and entrenched BS enmity. Calls for individual responsibility should always be preceded by directing demands at those with the most resources and power first.

Those with power are individuals too.

But a lot of what you said is the crux of capitalism and liberal ideology, even the most hard core liberal will agree that a company polluting a lake or stream for a but more profit is evil and they should be forced to bear the responsibility as a group. However, if it's not easy people won't do it, that is a fact for 99 percent of people which is also how we have a 1 percent.

Correctly using incentives and tax deductions would be the preferred way to encourage compliance with a mandate from the masses. Unfortunately we all seem to have fudal lords who are only concerned with their well being and not the masses they have pledged to serve. They want us to be divided and to not listen, as they can gain control by pushing tribalism.

 

[AusWolf]

Those with power are individuals too.

But a lot of what you said is the crux of capitalism and liberal ideology, even the most hard core liberal will agree that a company polluting a lake or stream for a but more profit is evil and they should be forced to bear the responsibility as a group. However, if it's not easy people won't do it, that is a fact for 99 percent of people which is also how we have a 1 percent.

Correctly using incentives and tax deductions would be the preferred way to encourage compliance with a mandate from the masses. Unfortunately we all seem to have fudal lords who are only concerned with their well being and not the masses they have pledged to serve. They want us to be divided and to not listen, as they can gain control by pushing tribalism.

Also, what's the point of presenting people with free choice if you attach a moral dilemma with one or some of the options? Isn't it essentially the same as a dictatorship where you don't even have a choice at all?

 

[bonehead123]

This thread brings to mind several phrases that I think describes the current state of affairs with regards to power needs of pc parts nowadays:

A) So hot, it's hot to trot... ("like a trailer park ho")
B) Stack it high & let it fry....
C) Heat it, street it, and three-peet it....
D) Feel da burn, or burn da feel....
E) Powa is as powa does....
F) Absolute power corrupts absolutely....
G) It it fries, it flys...

 

[onemanhitsquad]

"Not forgetting America with its love of cars with hugely stupid gas guzzling 5 litre+ engines."

hahahahaha...I drive a 1969 Chevy Camaro every chance I can in the summer...I have to offset some Prius'

 

[arni-gx]

i have no problem with that PC harward components, especially, new CPU and GPU series with more power draw, today and tomorrow, which using much power draw than before......

because, i living alone and i dont have money to buy that things.... so, its cool.......

 

[Valantar]

Those with power are individuals too.

True, but what I'm talking about isn't changing their individual day-to-day behaviour, but changing the rules and modes of operation of the systems under their control. This can happen (to varying degrees) through changing the morals or thinking of those individuals (though they would most likely face severe pushback from others - CEOs from board members or shareholder, etc.), but it's far more effective to do this through legislation and regulation. While these powerful individuals have more freedom to act and have a greater impact overall, they also operate within complex networks of power that strongly determine the scope of possible or sanction-free actions. There's no better way of ensuring your own firing as a CEO than unilaterally deciding that your company should take on """unnecessary""" self-regulation for environmental or societal purposes, at least in our current late-stage capitalist environment. So again: individualizing blame is counterproductive; to change systems, we need to address the systems, not the people.

But a lot of what you said is the crux of capitalism and liberal ideology, even the most hard core liberal will agree that a company polluting a lake or stream for a but more profit is evil and they should be forced to bear the responsibility as a group. However, if it's not easy people won't do it, that is a fact for 99 percent of people which is also how we have a 1 percent.

Well, that's why we have tried for a few centuries to build up functioning systems of government that try to keep power in public hands while also ensuring some degree of informed decisionmaking. Of course the success of these systems is extremely variable, and they have been consistently under attack from the wealthy and powerful, again with varying degrees of success. And when the most influential actor on global policy overall has devolved into a poorly disguised oligarchy with increasingly dysfunctional public institutions, it's hardly surprising that nobody is able to take meaningful action.

Oh, and regarding the pollution-responsibility thing: don't discount the willful blindness of the religion/libertarianism mix, which holds a near infinite amount of mechanisms for divesting those in power from the responsibilities of their actions. Either it's your god-given right to use the bountiful resources of the earth, or you have a moral right to always try to better your position in the world (while fervently denying the existence of or reliance upon anything resembling an interconnected large-scale society or environment). This is why politics is needed to address this, and why individualizing responsibility is useless: people can always concoct their own get-of-of-jail-free cards.

Correctly using incentives and tax deductions would be the preferred way to encourage compliance with a mandate from the masses. Unfortunately we all seem to have fudal lords who are only concerned with their well being and not the masses they have pledged to serve. They want us to be divided and to not listen, as they can gain control by pushing tribalism.

Yeah, that seems to be the way most places are moving for now. It's almost as if spending half a century concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few people might not be the best idea, or the one most conducive to societal freedom and prosperity? Though I'm a bit dubious on incentives and tax deductions alone - penalties are needed too; bad actions need harsh consequences. And of course you need effective enforcement for this to work (which then necessitates closing the revolving door between industry and regulation).

Sigh.