Hacker News Reader

Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

I'm still mad that I cant buy the Ryzen 3600E processor (45W TDP) as it's reserved to OEMs. I know i'm sacrificing performances, but I want an energy-efficient processor.

View on HN

You can set the TDP manually for the regular Ryzens, that does give you a significant reduction in power usage, at the cost of some performance. The difference in power usage is much larger than the drop in performance.

I haven't followed the Ryzen versions like the 3600E you mentioned, so I'm not sure how much binning is done there to get power consumption even lower, but I'd guess that you can get most of the effect with a regular Ryzen and manually setting the TDP to 45W.

You can lower the TDP on any Ryzen CPU, one time I accidentally set my power target to 15w instead of 150w, 8 cores at a blistering 1.2ghz.

Depending on your needs, compromise on GPU and use SSD instead HDD.

Take GPU like this one RX 570 https://www.newegg.com/sapphire-radeon-rx-570-100412p4gitxl/...

it's still good enough for many games, for me it's fine even with The Witcher 3, sure, not the top tier, but I also looked for energy efficient PC. As low energy Ryzens are hard to get, I took 5 3600 and compromised on GPU, storage and mobo.

As others have mentioned, you can manually adjust the TDP lower by reducing the max wattage for various power envelopes. This has all the same benefits that lower clocked mobile chips have in terms of power savings. The desktop chips are less efficient because they run at higher clocks where the returns have diminished as far as clock/power ratio.

You can buy a 3600 and mess around with p-states and voltages to get it to a lower power consumption.

Ryzen supports an Eco mode which will configure the power management functionality to assume a lower TDP. A Ryzen 3600 running in Eco mode will be functionally equivalent to a Ryzen 3600E.

>but I want an energy-efficient processor.

any particular reason why? power costs? cooling?

electric power bill mainly, if I want to let that run 24/7 at home

Reply on news.ycombinator.com