Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector
igorslab.de
igorslab.de
https://www.molex.com/molex/products/family/microfit_30?pare...
I suspect what's happening is Molex is making a new version of the terminal with higher clamping force or better plating, to keep the temperature rise down at higher current, and larger wire grips, to accommodate the thicker conductor. (This will also allow more heat flow away from the contact.)
However, the contact pitch is unchanged from 3.0mm, meaning the cavities in the housing can't grow any more, so the wire insulation thickness will be limited. That's not a big deal electrically since it's only 12 volts, but it's a consideration mechanically since the wires will be less protected against abrasion, pinching, and other damage.
https://www.molex.com/pdm_docs/ps/PS-43045-001.pdf
But that is allowing a maximum temperature rise of 30C, it uses 18AWG wire as you say, and it's supposed to be capable of 600V AC/DC; it's not supposed to decompose/leak more than 5mA when exposed to 2200V.
All of that is overkill for inside of a PC. If you're willing to limit the operating voltage to 12V and can guarantee that your board side conductors have big, multi-plane copper traces pulling heat out of the contacts to an actively cooled heat sink, you can get away with a lot that you couldn't if you were using the connector as, say, an in-line disconnect in some conduit for a 480V servo drive.
Pursuant to that, the ATX12VO standard is a huge step in the right direction. It ditches the 5v and 3v3 rails from the PSU and uses 12 only. This requires only modest changes to peripherals, most of which were getting most of their power from the 12v rail already.
I think it's an excellent stepping stone on the way to an ATX48VO or something. That will require some more changes because a lot of popular power semiconductors are only rated to 30v or 35v or something, so there will be some push for a 24v compromise, but I think the efficiency gains with a higher voltage will ultimately win out.
It's especially noticeable in smaller builds like those using mini-itx. Most of them GPU coolers draw air in from the bottom and exhaust out the sides, which doesn't really fit well the usual PC case airflow setup of draw cool air in the front and exhaust out the back and top. It seems like blower style coolers are also getting harder to find.
I'm hoping my next PC can have an AIO at the intake connected to the GPU, and a large air cooler for the CPU. That makes way more sense to me than having the AIO on the CPU and an air cooler on the GPU...
There are models of GPUs with AIOs, EVGA makes their Hydro series, Gigabyte has their waterforce series. They just usually aren't worth the cost since you have to design a new full cover block not just got every generation but also usually for different cards in the same gen too.
Lastly, TDP is not a defined standard and each manufacturer defines it differently. Intel for example defines TDP as the maximum allowable power draw under full load. How that translates to actual heat output depends on architecture and process node. Intel's most recent chips for example all max out at just over 100 watts TDP, but they're known to need 200+ watts of heat dissipation for sustained workloads.
But burning nearly a kilowatt on a gaming rig feels like a step too far. Sure, the power could be sourced from wind or solar plants, but there’s still a level of excessive conspicuous consumption going on here that doesn’t sit right with me.
If google didn't failed me, a good car mileage is equivalent to around 20kWh per 100 miles. Therefore, a 100 mile drive is loosely equivalent to a day or two gaming with one of these rigs.
Unless energy prices rise, it's literally pennies.
Why should I walk to our friends' house down the road? After all, I drive to work, so why not drive there too?
Why should I use less plastic? After all, I already use some plastic, so why not use more?
Why should I eat less meat? After all, I already eat some meat, why eat less?
It doesn't matter it's genshin impact or animal crossing but it definitely starts to matter when your gaming costs almost two orders of magnitude up in power from the typical case.
I suppose:
1. You often have to pre-heat the oven, so during that time, you are not cooking food
2. The oven is rarely full, so instead of heating food, you are heating the oven
3. The oven remains hot after the food is removed, but you could argue that's low-grade heat, unsuitable for cooking
If my electric oven is just 12% efficient, I'd like to know why (and how I can get one that is more efficient). I understand that microwave ovens are much more efficient (I guess because the heat is generated inside the food). But they're no good for browning food, or baking bread.
I'm still lost on this notion that an electric oven is just 12% efficient. If that's true, then I could patent a device that harvests energy from electric ovens, and make a mint.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f23/conventi...
TLDR: they measure with a metal block.
Please don't patronise!
My oven, on full power, draws 2KW (at least, that's what the labels on my fuze-box suggest). If only 12% of that energy is used to heat the food, then the oven amounts to a 200W food cooker, combined with an 1800W electric heater (I rounded down to 10% to make the reckoning easier).
I live in a studio flat; my oven is in my living room. How come I can survive without A/C? But I seem to be able to roast and bake without my home warming up.
My microwave is an old cheap one, with a max. power of 700W. Assuming that's 100% efficient, then it should cook food about 3.5 times faster than the inefficient oven, I guess; and it does. So it does seem that the oven is inefficient. But why? Where is the lost energy going?
To roast a chicken to 165f you'll probably set your oven to 400f. And then when it's done, the air and interior of your oven are still very hot. When you microwave food, you can touch the side-walls of your microwave right away and they won't be hot. The only excess heat in a microwave comes from the food steaming and contact with the platter.
This is getting out of control!
Nvidia/AMD: build more efficient GPUs!
On the other hand, taking heat into account just makes matters worse in the summer, and I haven't known a gamer who takes half the year off.
The heat pump can be effectively more than 100% efficient, but that's because it's moving heat.
Surely all the energy you put into any machine is eventually going to turn into heat? Hmm - perhaps there are heaters that generate heat mechanically, and the resulting losses are sonic.
My commute to and from the office alone would be about 90 minutes at that speed.
Running your gaming rig for three hours a day at 500W (1500 Wh) would therefore be the equivalent of driving 8km (5 miles) in a modern electric car. Still ok comparatively.
Plenty of people going on ski trips in Europe will run their car at 130kph for hours.
Very few people have computers capable of cooling a constant 500W.
While this is true, I don't agree with your statement about cooling.
It's very possible to have sustained 500W+ draw while playing a modern game on a 3080/3090. Sometimes you might play games for a few hours with a fairly consistent 500/600W power draw - honestly I think it's cheap and easy to cool this kind of load. A few 140mm fans and a mid-level CPU cooler should be enough.
Yeah... Nearly nobody has a few 140mm fans on their computers. Most people won't have any fan lager than 120mm. Powerful computers usually have a pair of them. Maybe 3 if you count the PSU.
Have you been to the US? I regularly drive 4+ hours at 125kmh+ anytime I'm trying to get to the Sierra, or Utah or Arizona, which is often.
In fact, almost every weekend I drive at least 3 hours round trip, half freeway half mountain roads, if I go to the closest good climbing. 5+ if I go to my preferred locale. The distances people regularly cover are enormous.
This isnt even including fossil fuels, nuclear/fusion, biomass/trash, and hydro.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec#/media/File:Fullneed....
It’s one of the major reasons EV ranges keep increasing the batteries are less expensive.
Energy is a proxy for accomplishment and development. Humanity's #1 goal should be to maximize energy use per capita while minimizing energy use per activity, such that every human is doing as many desirable activities as possible.
Gaming at 1kW for an hour costs 30 cents or less in electricity. As others have mentioned indirectly, going for a Sunday drive to see the changing leaves uses more energy. A space heater uses more power.
Maybe this is what feels off?
A kilowatt feels like too much for a videogame. This isn't a bitcoin mining thing, is it?
How much energy does a golf cart use? Cause those golfers are using a golf-cart for miles when their legs are perfectly acceptable (and golf-carts are illegal in professional play)
Do Crypto People use their GPU generated heat as heater assuming they lives in a place that requires heating anyway?
Doesn't that equate to free money assuming they could actually mine crypto?
Gas is somewhere around half the cost of electricity. Back in the day, you would still profit with a GPU.
Some people use electric heating even without crypto so using GPUs to mine crypto to get the same effect is a no brainer.
Problem is that during the summer you have to get rid of the excess heat, so you need air conditioning or perhaps open air cooling.
Not gonna lie, I've used my GPU to heat up my small room before.
That's how I read it at least.
Or icebergs - Reyjavik is a popular place to build data-centres, so I have heard. They also have good geothermal in those parts.
My previous computer didn't run very hot at all so the exhaust fan on the top blew onto the underside of my desk and then at me, it was actually uncomfortably cold in the winter. This new one is something else, though.
Good lord, just 2 generation back GPUs like the 1070Ti consumed 180W. Even if you add a CPU (of that era) like the i7-7700 with it 65W draw, that just 245W. Now a video card alone can draw more power.
Apparently this sounds fair to you!
If the "all-electric" branch of the environmental movement are right, we'll eventually need to adopt the superior European kettle technology. Getting everyone on the same plug would be great.
Worse kettle performance is unfortunate. But better safety is a nice side effect (in particular as the NEMA connector the US uses is dangerous/poorly designed/bad, even with the ground pin).
The voltage arriving at the building is kind of irrelevant to the discussion. The question is whether a connection could even sustain the house network at double the voltage with larger appliances than it was designed for.
My post talked about voltages arriving at appliances in US homes. Many appliances are designed and in fact receive 220 V. There's even a common (i.e. near every home) plug/wiring/breaker standard for 220 V.
You're the one trying to steer the discussion towards "arriving Vs. using" whereas the first line of my post was expressly about the active use of 220 V in near every US home today (tumble dryers, ovens, central heating, EV chargers, shop equipment, etc).
> The question is whether a connection could even sustain the house network at double the voltage with larger appliances than it was designed for.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. A full end-to-end circuit has to be built for a specific voltage and amperage. If you want to turn a 110 V into a 220 V, you have to re-wire from the breaker otherwise the wiring will overheat and catch fire.
It is substantially easier to run additional customer connections for those edge cases where an existing 200A residential service will not suffice.
Sometimes we'll run 5 gaming PCs + 5 monitors from one socket and it's always worked fine.
If you've ever been to dreamhack or one of those gigantic lan gaming conventions, you would probably have noticed the massive power distribution transformers staged every 300 feet or so on the floors.
I honestly don't know how they would manage power delivery if every single person was running a ~1kW gaming load.
That makes me a bit sad. We used to have a mess of plugs and sockets, with older plugs being either two round non-insulated pins or two equal-sized flat pins (sockets that could fit both kinds were not uncommon, but sockets which could fit only one kind were also not uncommon), and a Y with three flat pins for air conditioners, with NEMA 5-15 also being popular for computers (and we had sockets which could fit both the NEMA 5-15 "computer plug" and the other two types). We switched the whole country to a really neat new plug type (NBR 14136, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBR_14136 for a few pictures), but unfortunately it's only 10A (or 20A, but that's mostly for higher-power appliances like air conditioners; nearly all sockets are going to be the 10A variant, even though the 20A socket is designed to work fine with 10A plugs).
Our voltage can be either 127V or 220V depending on which city you live in (yeah, both voltages use the same plug, but that was already the case even with the older plugs), and on how your building is wired (even in places with 127V you can get 220V by wiring phase-phase instead of phase-neutral), so it's not unusual to be limited to 10A at 127V which is around 1200W only.
At which point does the GPU get its own dedicated power supply?
A GPU these days can often do general purpose compute, but not in a way that meaningfully allows it to compete with the OS for heavily branched or random access workloads since its memory controller and execution model are a poor fit. I'm not sure we'd ever see GPUs fully displace CPUs for that reason.
(See Slide 5): https://papers.put.as/papers/firmware/2014/2014-10_Breakpoin...
I'm not sure if any released graphics card has used their own power supplies. I think they all used some sort of internal connection to the standard power supply if the slot can't power it alone.
This is true in many machines already for several years, if you look at the machines the hard to find GPUs are actually in.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that is a market force behind this new PCIe standard.
Its like an acknowledgement of reality is seen as an endorsement of that reality.
You think in datacenters they are just stacking up PSUs? No, all of this stuff gets vastly more efficient and reliable if you can build just one big PSU to supply say 48V DC and distribute that everywhere.
The question was more rhetorical than serious.
A US power outlet is typically rated at 120VAC@15A, that's a 1800W budget if the only thing on the circuit is a PC.
AMD and NVidia have at times competed on power usage, but generally that doesn't sell units to the degree that game support or new features do.
For mobile you start getting traction there because '<vendor>-based laptops have an hour of extra battery life' is meaningful, but gamer laptops are typically designed to be plugged in. The higher power draw typically means more heat and louder fans as well but for some reason noise doesn't seem to be a consideration for most gamers - every gaming laptop I've ever used was unbearably loud.
Pretty much any “AAA” game at 120+Hz, high resolution, with image quality cranked up.
I’ve had friends who managed to snag 3090s at prices they found acceptable (sic…), and had to change psus because theirs were a tad short (despite being theoretically ok going off of nameplate capacity, though it’s also possible the rails distribution was off). They were rebuilding gaming rigs, no crypto there.
Technically the 2x8 / 1x12 setup of the 3090 is off-spec, these are not officially supported PCI configurations.
Efficiency aside, simply pushing the power requirements doesn't even bring home the bacon. Nintendo's "lateral thinking with withered technology" works super well, just look at the switch compared to any of the consoles of its generation. I know PC gaming is different but even there people dig streams of undertale over cyberpunk (although cyberpunk had issues...), so not everything is pushing power requirements.
Literally, if all that matters is "realism" and "power" and pushing that boundary is an end in and of itself, well that boundary is already pushed by others. I mean may be not with a GPU but I work in HPC and I'm sure as hell my simulations draw more than 600W. So, this is a push for power in games specifically and that just starts to draw out my boomer side and wonder why people just don't try to go back and optimize their code first.
Fewer people by virtue of how expensive 120+Hz equipment (not just the monitors but everything else) can afford that stuff, and if you're limiting your $60 game to just those people that also reduces sales. Again, the logic isn't there, and you won't beat Animal Crossing New Horizons in earnings so even the economics isn't there. The logic is totally wrong.
I sort of looked up to gamedevs because they seem to accomplish a good experience without having to model everything, and its an attitude I've fantasized about bringing to my work. It sounds however like they are moving in our direction which is disappointing I guess.
1. Should Games really be pushing GFx heavy / realism vs Nintendo Style Game?
Well first I absolutely love Nintendo and their Games. But the answer is first, Nintendo's target market is very different to PS5, Xbox / PC. I am sure Battlefield fans just dont think it will work on Nintendo style graphics. Second it really have nothing to do with Game Dev, more to do with Games priorities. i.e The question then becomes a Design / Market Fit / Choices questions rather than a technical question.
2. Keeping Games Efficient.
AAA Games, or as a matter of fact nearly all Games are efficient, comparatively speaking. Just look at how browsers, one of the most optimised piece of software is still learning their lessons from Game Dev. Games are using as much power as they could to push the limit on Graphics, and Physics within Games. That is not an efficiency question, but how much power they could push the boundary. Remember 4K Res is FOUR times the resolution of 2K. 120 Fps will be TWO times the normal standard of 60fps, that is 8 times the complexity alone excluding any additional high quality asset or modelling. I didn't even put Ray Tracing in that equation into it. Even if you assume 600W gives you double the performance of 300W ( which it doesn't ). You already see the disparity between complexity and performance improvement.
Finally, the third point I want to mention is hypothetically speaking Ray Tracing will lower the cost of Graphics Asset, which is by far the largest cost centre for Modern Games. Since designer no longer have to do all sort of special tricks for effects and save them some time. Although I imagine in reality these saved cost and time will only be used somewhere else for even better graphics.
On 1, the point is that graphics and what you call game dev isn't really that necessary to sell or to be fun. It was in response mostly to people who for some reason think it is, especially those who think that "battlefield" or "the last of us" games are a different category of game. Idk, that sort of thinking is a big problem and part of why games have moved away from being fun and being what lead to the rise of "press f to pay respects" being a meme. Too much emphasis on very American thoughts of what makes a game good: graphics, intricacy or complexity, and too much story telling vs what actually does without fail, just being fun. The thing is making something fun is actually pretty difficult because it require ingenuity and creativity, while the others just require grinding and there is already a path forward. Again, I said this was a tangent because it is, I'm just tired of modern games just plain not being fun and being too geared towards being interactive movies with eye candy. The enabling (requiring) of 600W cards for a video game is just yet another result of this slide of the larger game dev space which is why I bring it up.
On 2, I know you're saying comparatively but really just compare to games from 10 years ago, 20 years ago. I remember talking to game developers who need to cut corners say they don't worry about handling memory for strings "that are just a few megabytes anyway" and sure may be you don't need to worry about that today but no, by an absolute scale gamedevs are neglecting things like string processing[0] whilst caring so damn much about graphics, so you can't argue that things are not more inefficient now. I get your points about 120hz 4k though, though honestly if these are the power requirements, then I'm starting to develop an opinion that 120hz might make gaming start to be an activity that is bad for other reasons, particularly climate change as is argued in other threads in this comment section.
Anyway, the general reason for this rant is again, AAA game devs are approaching a similar state like the js community, whereas instead of being caught in a cycle of churning frameworks, they're caught in an arms race to try to make things bigger and more "realistic" and eventually more resource consuming whilst getting their lunch being eaten by (relatively, in AAA's eyes) garbage looking things like fortnite, animal crossing, undertale, with vastly lower budgets. I want them to realize these massively successful games which aren't in the vein of what you think of being AAA diffuses the fog and makes studios which have gobs of money realize what actually makes games good and thus which will actually make them sell.
[0] https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Undertale/comments/4auo3n/putting_u...
You're also conflating graphics, game design, and hardware design. These are not the same groups. Every pillar is pushing forward. There's no zero sum game there.
Just as an example.
Yes, no doubt. Specially nowadays when point clouds are all the rage.
I could see how that could end up getting very computation intensive very quickly! Building up the 3-D space, tagging spots where the math doesn't quite work out... Compensating for different lighting conditions from different pictures at different angles to get just the info you're looking for!
Or am I completely off base?
* 15-20 arm64 SBCs
* 5 Ryzen nodes
* a handful of HDDs and a decent number of SSDs
* an enterpriseish 48-port PoE switch using 10GBE on some ports
* 5 x86 SBCs (routers)
ML training
Well, since its the brand new, top-of-the-line connector, hopefully very few current applications will max it out.
With a 5900X (slight overclock for max boost at 5.1GHz), some lightly overclocked 64GB of DDR4 memory, two 27” 1440p displays, a phone dock, KB, mouse, web cam and condenser mic it idles at about 150W.
General productivity, like development with a few VMs spun up, and maybe watching a 1080p video in the background? Maybe 180W.
Streaming a game. So I’m capping myself at 1080p60, which does not stress the 3080Ti with all settings maxed out. Two LED light rings also on, plus an LED pendant lamp. Now we’re squarely in 350-400W land for the entire setup.
Not streaming. 1440p, capping at 120fps (displays go to 170Hz). If settings are cranked up on a very recent title and I’m GPU bound, this is where the GPU alone can actually hit 400W by itself in some scenes (usually 280-350W) and the total power consumption for the room maxes at 600-650W.
—- ——-
There’s 6 140mm PWM case fans, the CPU has two 150mm PWM fans, and the GPU has three 92mm PWM fans. Case is all steel with sound deadening foam on both side panels. In every settings it’s silent unless I’m “going for broke” at max quality for averaging 120fps, where it’ll then be a “light whirr” once it’s heat soaked, which I’ve measured at 24.8dBA at 3 feet (~92 cm). GPU peaks at 76C, GPU memory peaks at 70C, CPU is around 65C, and system memory at 35C. All air cooled.
—- ————
Here’s the thing. Come next year, it’ll be a 32-core Threadripper with 256GB of memory and a NVMe RAID 10 array for real work with Spark without constantly paying by the hour. The CPU, storage, and system memory alone will probably pull 500W under max load factoring in the displays, KB and mouse. Still will idle close to 165W though.
It is also interesting on one hand you have Apple pushing CPU and GPU integration for maximum efficiency. Where Apple could make a potential 300W TDP SoC for their Mac Pro. On the other hand you have CPU pushing to 400W ( and higher in the future ) while GPU pushing to 600W.
>>Why do you need to have 600W to power a graphics card?
You don't. There is no GPU currently that needs that much. But as cards are comfortably approaching 400W and more, a new connector is necessary so you don't end up with GPUs taking 3 or 4 existing PCIe 8-pin power connectors. This single 55-amp compatible connector allows for significantly easier routing of paths on circuit boards.
>>Why do they need an independent power connector?
Because the PCIe slot alone can only provide 75W of power. And if it could provide more you'd need to provide that power to the motherboard so you just moved your connector from one place to another.
Here's the thing. When you have a lot of amps, they create noise in wires next to them. They'll also need thick wires and will get hot. When you have a lot of volts, they'll go through shielding and start a fire.
Do you really want to place something with a lot of amps and volts next to something that's transmitting timed high-bandwidth data, like a graphics card? Or run the entire output of your big PSU box that needs a bunch of fans, through the motherboard? For a tower form factor?
The single slot for power and data is convenient for phones and laptops. Not something that's 600W and is going to power a space heater in its next kilowatt+ iteration.
I mean, that power all gets turned into heat anyway in the end; so sure, if you need more heating, forget the two-bar fire, and buy a graphics controller instead - playing games with the two-bar fire isn't a good plan.
I don't get why they can't make efficient GPUs. I mean, I do get that graphics depends on computation, and that all computation has an intrinsic minimum energy cost; but half a killowatt, to make a moving picture? That's more than the power supply for my gaming rig (which I retired, because the fan noise was excessive).
They do make efficient GPUs, see smartphones. Even current desktop cards are efficient considering their computational power, but they are increasingly tuned to run with higher power budgets. Turns out people care more about FPS than power consumption I guess? Also consider that winning the performance crown has a halo effect for the rest of the portfolio, so the performance / high-end models are tuned towards that.
Some may marvel at the incredible power available to consumers now, but I've been watching with disappointment at how each new generation is only very slightly better in the performance per watt metric. Most of the new compute power is coming from increased energy draw. In an energy-conscious environment it's quite hard to justify.
It just seems seriously counter-intuitive to claim that spending 600W to put a moving colour picture on a screen the size of a bed-pillow counts as "efficient".
[Edit: obviously it doesn't take 600W to play back an HD movie - the energy is being spent on game computations, or hashing, or something like that]