Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_eiman | Hacker News Reader

Saving watts means lowering fan RPM, meaning less noise. And that's a big priority for many.

Not only that, i'd prefer to have a small amount of ram and cpu to be running 24/7 for always-on features that I'd love to have my PC doing.

I don't like having to run a PI for some stuff just because i don't want my huge tower running all the time, it would be really neat if it could run at anything between 5 - 600W, not sure though if the PSUs would be able to offer that range.

Also, aren’t desktop CPUs constrained by thermal load at some point or can we use ever bigger coolers? Personally, I find it almost obscene that my desktop PC consumes roughly as much as a good old incandescent lightbulb (60+W) while idling. My laptop uses as much under full load.

Your PC uses 60w idling? Is that with screen? It's not too much in that case. CPUS and GPUS have gotten a lot better at idle power consumption, and PSUs are also quite efficient these days.

As discussed here [1], a fairly beefy Ryzen/RTX setup is often found idling around that number.

[1] https://hardforum.com/threads/killawatt-owners-whats-the-idl...

Downvolt and downclock your RAM when possible. Turn off VRM phases when not needed (also on the GPU; RAM should be handled properly already on it).

Allow package-C6. Turn on PCIe power saving stuff.

There is a bunch of stuff that mildly hurts performance and greatly improves efficiency in intermittent workloads, by letting hardware sleep/power-off when not needed.

I guess so - I really don't care about the fan noise (I'd rather PC makers think more about sound proofing for that rather than reducing fan RPM thus reducing performance).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com