Wow, Raptor Lake's max TDP looks to be 253W. That's crazy high
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13th-gen-raptor-lake...
If some of Nvidia's next generation 4xxx series GPUs are close to 1000w draw as many rumors suggest, the total draw of a high spec Intel/Nvidia system is going to probably have similar running costs to an electric space heater when playing demanding games. The existing 3090ti is already a 500w part, which not so long ago was enough to power a whole system in addition to the GPU.
Now I am all for being green but there are things in my household that are much more of a concern than this.
Huge datacenters full of these chips is one thing. A personal computer for hacking & gaming probably not such a big deal.
Have you run the calculation? It's worthwhile configuring suspend for PCs these days. My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.
My power is some of the cheapest in the country and we pay ~13 cents/kWh. It's a little misleading though since my bill breaks out generation and distribution costs into separate line items. They are both billed per kWH though and add up to 13 cents.
I wasn't trying to be misleading though because the point is the basic charge does not increase with usage. So for each additional kWh we add to that it's only $0.089/kWh.
500W is a very high average power consumption. And my electricity is 0.13 USD/kWh, which is about half 0.25 CHF/kWh.
True average power is probably below 100W, for a total cost in the realm of 10 CHF or USD per month.
If you’re living in a colder state, you may have to subtract the costs of having lower heating costs.
Also, consuming more energy is bad and this rush to apologize lack of innovation in gpu and cpus weve seen in the last decade is ridiculous.
Where does it end? I'm okay with a 5000cc truck because airplanes and cruise ships are much worse?
If you don't want to drive a 5l truck, don't drive one, but 500W is not an average load, and if you have high electricity costs thats a you problem not an everyone else problem.
The largest parts of my electrical bill are distribution and overhead charges that don't change whether I use power or not. The marginal utility of the power vs the cost is quite reasonable.
The performance gains are non existent and largely driven by bigger and bigger chips on smaller nodes.
There is no innovation in gpu and x86 cpus space since a long time, that happens only on arm nowadays.
Each of the last 4 generations of mid to high-end card from Nvidia has required more electricity than the last. By Nvidia's own admission, their future chips will get larger and hotter to some extent due to slow down in moore's law and future process nodes being harder to reach. The die size of the parts has also grown which does not help.
Its not a small trajectory either; 4 years ago the most power hungry consumer part from Nvidia was a 1080ti which would easily draw 250w under load. today that number is now 500w for the current 3090ti, and rumored to be 800-1000 for the 4xxx parts launching end of this year. A GPU often will sit at peak draw for hours at a time in games as they try to push as many FPS as possible.
A current gaming machine with recent components can easily exceed 500w constant load during gameplay, and this figure will rise again with the 4xxx parts.
The ONLY exception to this really is Apple devices, and even then its not clear we can compare an M1/M2 GPU to the fastest parts Nvidia offer.
Oh boy, you should visit USA sometime. A 5 liter truck is the small one.
Who is running their computer at 500W 24/7 ?
No modern PC should be pulling 500W all the time.
Idle power can be as low as 20-30W depending on the build.
You should also allow it to sleep, of course.
> My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.
Something is wrong. A 3090 should only pull about 20 Watts at idle: https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-review-... . You might have some process forcing it into full-speed 3D mode for some reason.
Your example is in now representative of reality.
sucks if you run an AC though :)
I'm from southern italy, it's hot, you sweat, you don't need to burn gas, coal or build infrastructure so people waste it to cool their room, this is so entitled and no wonder we're in full climate crisis.
People can't give up on anything really. It gets worse everyday and people's remedy is to make it even worse,. Nonsense.
So yes, it makes things much worse with a hot pc in the room.
Sounds like a route to being penny-wise and pound-foolish. If you cut cheap entertainment you may well end up spending more (because in practice it's very hard to just sit in a room doing nothing), and if your gaming costs are a lot smaller than your energy bills then the cost should be relatively insignificant, almost by definition.
I hope you make a lot more per hour of work. Stop worrying about that.
This power draw is getting out of hand on desktop, consoles and x86 laptops and is largely a symptom of lack of competition and lack of technological advances.
By any reasonable measure they're not. £1 for "a few hours" of fun is a very cheap hobby.
So yes, I can "easily" afford it, but it doesn't mean that the energy consumption of my gaming rig hasn't affected how I think about it. Any future hardware upgrades will also be impacted by this - there is no way I'm buying a GPU with 500W TDP, even if again, I can afford the energy bills.
Those rumors are for millisecond long transient spikes, not an average of anything. So basically the rumor is a 500w peak load. Just like how the current 350-400w GPUs have transient spikes to upwards of 800w. It's not a problem in terms of power consumption (although obviously the increase from 400w to 500w would be), rather it's an issue with over-current protection in power supplies tripping. It's a "need bigger capacitors" type problem.
Not yet!
It adds up, especially in data centers where you end up needing even more megawatts of power and cooling capacity.
These CPUs aren't consuming 250W all the time. Those are peak numbers.
Both Intel and AMD are providing huge efficiency gains, too. Rumors show the new i7 13700T Raptor Lake part can have a 35W mobile TDP and still outperform a Ryzen 7 5800X: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13700t-raptor-lake-a...
Speed scales nonlinearly with power. These high TDP parts are halo parts meant for enthusiast builds where it doesn't matter that the machine draws a lot of power for an hour or two of gaming.
It's also trivially easy to turn down the maximum power limit in the BIOS if that's what someone wants. The power consumption isn't a fixed feature of the CPU. It's a performance/power tradeoff that can be adjusted at use time.
I guess I could imagine a few threads for managing different 'panes', a thread for chat, a thread for audio maybe? It's hard to think of 24 independent units of work.
I'm not a game dev, just used to play PoE and curious.
Maybe with these frameworks threads are less dedicated and instead are more cooperative, idk. Really not my area!
This was back in the Windows XP days when I was working on OpenGL and DirectX. It would do this while rendering like a couple of triangles. One core I could understand, but not all. I'm pretty sure the driver had some spinlocks in there.
I also managed to find out the NVIDIA driver assumed user buffers passed to OpenGL (VBOs) would be 16-byte aligned, using aligned SIMD operations on them directly, even though there's no mention of alignment in the OpenGL spec.
It just so happened that Microsoft's C++ runtime would do 16-byte aligned allocations, while the language I was using only did 4-byte.
All is fair in love and performance wars I suppose...
The trade-off is that some number of frames of latency are now baked in by default, but if it means your game went from 30hz to 60hz with an frame of delay, it is about as responsive as it was before, but feels smoother.
U gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers.
Don´t let the TDP of T-models fool you. Power consumption to reach boost clocks can peak up to 100W for T-models of the previous generation, and the 13700T probably needs to run close to that to outperform a 5800X.
But they require a heat-sink management designed for that peak. And it is insane. Try to keep microwave oven under 100C :-)
CPUs and GPUs keep getting hungrier and that is just not where we should be heading. I wish the perf increase didnt keep coming along consumption increase each gen.
As technologists, we should support manufacturers pushing the limit in power and performance. It helps drive overall efficiency and move technology forward.
1070 vs 3070 is +52٪ average (145 vs 220w) and +66% (154 vs 250w) sustained.
2070 vs 3070 is +10% (195) or +24% (203) sustained.
Even the 3060 you defend draws power as older flagships and 500w arent enough even for mainstream gaming.
And it keeps getting worse both on gpu and cpu size.
We aren't technologists but consumers, and reality is that x86 and gpus are in near duopolys so the 3 companies involved have little reasons to do a better job and it's clear Apple socs or more and more cloud moving into arm have not been enough of wake up calls.
In fact, the 3070 is significantly more power efficient than the 1070 is. Because while yes power is up 50%, performance is up 100%. So performance per watt has continued to improve even as power consumption has also increased.
The reality of power consumption is that it's the main lever to pull right now to deliver generational gains. It's the same lever Apple pulled for the M2 even.
> more and more cloud moving into arm have not been enough of wake up calls.
You mean the ARM enterprise SoCs that use just as much power as x86 does to deliver on average worse performance?
It is a few years old, though, so maybe by now quality standards have improved even for those kinds of cheapo-meters…
You probably want a UPS anyway if you've got a power guzzling (and thus presumably expensive) machine.
My standard dev machine is ~1kW flat out, ~500W most of the time, probably 100W idle. Runs for about eight hours a day. Say 500W is the average, suggests 4kW/hr a day. That's about $2 a day in the UK.
(those power numbers are relatively high - it's an elderly threadripper with two GPUs)
Electricity needs of an average household in western world are going to increase a lot in coming decades, with transition to more electric heating, cooking, cars, etc. Gaming machine power usage is minuscule compared to those.
Back of the envelope calculation here:
Assuming an average oven consumes 2kWh, and a CPU 0.1kWh:
Oven for four hours (average weekly usage) would be 2 * 4 = 8kWh weekly.
CPU for 24 hours, 7 days a week = 0.1 * 24 * 7 = 16.8kWh weekly.
While most house electronics keep pushing to consume less, computers go in the opposite direction.
This also adds tons of heat in my laptops or the air.
Working or gaming in a small room during hot days is painful.
Even consoles making noises of a turbo jet are nowadays considered normal. It's a disaster.
And I've only got a 3900X+2070 Super...
Rented house so can't do much about the absolutely useless heating setup.
A friend of mine is an electrician so the price was very reasonable, and it has been worth it, especially during this hot summer.
It was reasonably cheap, and in my next house I'll do the same again. Running additional circuits is pretty easy if you have an attic or crawl space.
A beefy CPU, GPU and a couple of high end monitors can take you to the edge of that and over.
Why would monitors even be factored in? They shouldn't be on the same circuit anyway.
I’ve never seen anyone, in corporate and home environments , split their circuit use like you describe.
All they would see is an electrical cable and plug in hand, and an electrical outlet on the wall. Put two and two together, computer turns on. Circuits? Watts? Load? Might as well be pig latin.
I have a microwave (1270W) and dishwasher (2400W) on the same circuit (230V, 16A). It didn't trip yet...
Alternatively, if you already have a multi-phase connection, then you would of course have the lines on different phases. If you have a 3-phase connection 25A main fuse is common, for single phase connections 35A is common.
For context, most American homes have 240V split phase (single phase for all intents and purposes) service with a 200A main breaker.
Three phase on the other hand is a slight of hand, since that gives you more power than what 230V would imply ;)
3kW is typical kitchen power.
> 3kW is typical kitchen power
Most stoves used to be gas powered. Now induction is becoming more common (but it requires an upgrade to 4.5kW).
I have a relative whose house burnt down due to stapled wiring in the attic. Thermal cycling eventually created a short. When your attic catches on fire the smoke alarms go off in time to save the people, but the moment the ceiling starts to cave in the entire house is involved and you’re mostly trying to keep the neighboring houses from burning.
We have the original fabric sheathed wire as well in the walls still which needs to be replaced to modernize the electrical system.
if you run a separate circut for the Microwave, and separate your bathroom vent + your bathroom LED lights, you can run all of them at the same time with your toster. Running circuts is comparatively easy, vs installing a new 200A fuse box.
With a steady load you can run a circuit breaker past the rated amperage on the breaker. But look at it funny and it will pop.
The most obvious case of this was when I knew someone who would plug a vacuum into a different circuit and blow a breaker. Just a little noise on the wires and click.
If you have to wire a room, ask for a larger gauge of wire so have the option of a larger breaker if you want it.
I did a nCase M1 build recently and my objective for the build was small as possible, quiet as possible, and as powerful as possible in that order. I still ended up with a pretty powerful machine by going with an i3-12100 instead of an i5/i7 which uses much less power and puts out less heat. The RTX 3080 reference card was the biggest card that could fit into the case which I undervolted.
A lot of people are undervolting their RTX GPU's because for an only about a ~3% performance loss you get about 10C less temp which translates to far less fan noise. I don't know why Nvidia doesn't just have a one click button for people.
nCase unfortunately have discontinued this case based on 'market factors' which I suspect means that they don't anticipate things to be getting smaller and cooler any time soon.
Certainly not much more expensive than a regular mATX build imho.
Bah, this is brilliant. I just upgraded a 1070 to a 3070 and am flabbergasted at how much heat it dumps into my room. One of the reasons I did not go with the 3080 was the ~100 watt lower draw.
Do you know of any good tooling to assess the impact of undervolting or is it a manual guess-and-check process?
Perhaps I'll wait with the video card until they give me the option to do the same there...
You can get great results pretty fast this way. My Mini-ITX build is about as thermally compact as possible given the parts (3080+Ryzen 5600X, NZXT H1), and I'm pushing my PSU to the absolute limits in the stock settings, so undervolting is important for safe power margins since the 3080 can reach ~360W in my testing. I think 30 minutes of tweaking got me something like a +80W power drop for only 10% FPS in Read Dead Redemption 2 @ 4k60fps; I never breach 300W now which is within my personal safety margins, and can native 4k everything.
Some software like Afterburner have "Overclock Scanner" tools that will run benchmarks and repeatedly try to dial these settings in for you, but it really is easier to just modify the curve manually and test your specific workloads.
so not only does this not test the rest of the cpu at all - meaning you can run into problems with other parts of the CPU that aren't stable at those frequencies, because they're not being tested because it's only running the AVX units - but it also doesn't test frequency/power state changes at all, so you can run into situations where as soon as you close prime95 and it drops to a lower p-state, it'll crash.
gpus have run into similar things with furmark and kombuster and other power-virus tests... actually the GPUs themselves will detect when they're running and throttle down, so they no longer even do the thing they're supposed to, but, gpus also change power/frequency states under real-world workloads, just like CPUs, and they don't under furmark/kombuster. this actually caused a crisis at the ampere launch... all the testing had been done with a "pre-release bios" that only allowed these sorts of power/thermal testing, and it turned out that while the chips might be stable at max p-state, they weren't stable when they shifted back to a lower p-state, or from a lower p-state back to maximum. That was the whole "POSCAP vs MLCC" thing.
prime95 and furmark were very very popular 10 years ago but that's where they belong, they don't do the job anymore these days.
For variable refresh rate monitors, it's best to use framerate limiters as well: either in-game or in the Nvidia control panel. Set the cap at least a few fps lower than your monitor's max refresh rate. Even better, aim for 90-100 fps cap, beyond which diminishing returns kick in and power bills continue to creep up.
I also have a mini-ITX Lone L5 build with an i3-12100 and no GPU with a 192W PSU. (Effectively - PSU is technically a bit more, but the AC/DC adapter is only 192W.)
With the same priorities and a deemphasis on graphics, I present to you the Mellori-ITX: https://github.com/phkahler/mellori_ITX
Uses the CPU fan as a case fan. By protruding through the top we get a lower profile than is possible with any other ITX case (well the standoffs can be cut down but that has not be optimized).
My next build will be an upgrade of the same design but with a Zen 4 or 5 chip with 8 or 16 cores depending what fits in the power constraints of the Pico-PSU. It will be a while though because that system is still more than enough for everything I do with it.
You can also limit your i7 power usage, so no need to go for an i3 if you have the money.
Yeah, I did exactly that with my 3080. Dropped ~50W depending on the game and I was able to keep the same clock speeds.
I am unsure what the normal household circuit amperage is in the EU or elsewhere...
Probably would've been fine if it were a 20A circuit and not a 15A, but it did remind me how much power these things draw...
Or with power in SF averaging 40-ish cents per kWh a standard evening gaming session can easily cost a non-negligible amount of money.
Printing often pops the breaker. I had to move the printer out of my home office into a bedroom, but even then we've popped the breaker when printing while vacuuming.
(It's not a case of bad wiring, either.)
I've been assuming it was current, because if it has the circuit to itself, nothing trips.
(My office only has one circuit, which is dedicated to the room. I could have asked for 20 amps, but it didn't occur to me.)
Opportunity for software that dynamically adjusts CPU and GPU power targets in the middle of various games, learns the game's power/performance profile and whether it's CPU/GPU bottlenecked, and optimizes perf/watt while maintaining a given FPS target?
Throw in 2 monitors and a speaker system and you're coming close to overloading your 15amp breaker.
I already have issues where the breaker would pop with my current gaming PC if it fully spins up and I had to get a 20A circuit put in to handle it (mostly because there is more than one computer on the circuit).
But you don't have to buy those cards. I play my games in QHD on a Radeon 6700XT 12GB, which tops out at about 165W.
Even if you ran 1kW (...somehow) you could still connect 3 of them and still have 600W left for audio/monitors.
I would say it's more normal to be fused to 10A for most indoor things, anything else is not normal, as most home appliance power cables are not even thick enough to carry the 16A 230V power safely.
even in this thread you see people saying "wow intel pulls 250W against AMD's 105W processors"... when the comparable PPT number for AMD this generation is actually 230W, and their previous-gen number was 145W.
It's a huge marketing disadvantage, just like with node naming for fabs. Intel's 14nm is hugely better than GF 14/12nm or TSMC 16/12nm, and 10ESF is comparable to TSMC 7nm (although much later ofc). When the competitors are playing marketing games, to some extent you just have to start playing them too.
Desktop/HEDT TDPs used to pretty much cover boost clocks, the "tau" concept always officially existed but (eg) 5960X has a 143W idle-to-prime95 power delta as measured by Anandtech, so, the 140W tdp is pretty much sufficient to cover any "normal" non-prime95 AVX load at full boost clock. Similarly 4770K is a 85W TDP on paper and the measured idle-to-prime95 is 88W. Overclocked desktop loads could go higher of course, but most people overrode tau limits anyway in those cases. So in practice, tau limit was pretty much only a thing that existed on laptops in the intel world, because there was always enough TDP available to cover boost clocks, in a stock configuration.
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph8426/67026.png
Then AMD came along with Ryzen and started marketing around base TDPs, and made their boost TDP this other higher number (but it's not a boost TDP guys, it's, uh, PPT, yeah!!!!)... and allowed it to boost to the higher number for an unlimited period of time. 9-series really started pushing it and Tau limits started becoming a problem, but it looks really bad to have a 145W TDP when the competition has 105W... even if it's the same actual power consumption in practive. So over time Intel more or less had to move to the same "TDP/PPT" concept as AMD.
It's really really noxious in laptops where AMD allows processors to boost to 50% (more than the desktop chips even!) above their configured TDP for an unlimited period of time. Yeah partners get to pick the cTDP for the particular laptop, but either way an AMD chip with a 15W cTDP gets to use 50% more power than an Intel with a 15W cTDP, for an unlimited duration, which is a huge functional advantage... basically a 15W AMD laptop is more comparable to a 25W Intel laptop in terms of power draw, and a 25W AMD will pull more power than a 35W Intel. So they move themselves up a whole power bracket through The Magic Of Technical Marketing (tm).
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16084/Power%20-%2015W%20Co...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-raptor-lake-to-featu...
235W is well within the range of what a decent air cooler like the Noctua NH-D15 can handle without excessive fan noise.
But Intel and AMD also make enough chips with very good efficiency for the average folk who don't need to set benchmark records.
AMD's Threadripper PRO CPUs come with up to 280W TDPs.
It's really not a problem with modern air coolers and not a problem at all for people running liquid coolers.
A 253W boost TDP isn't really a big deal any more. There are plenty of smaller CPUs for people who don't want such high overheads.
Some of Intel's new parts can be limited to 35W and still outperform a Ryzen 7 5800X: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13700t-raptor-lake-a...
There's a lot of "sky is falling" over these numbers, but it's a non-issue for the enthusiast builds these are targeted at. Nobody is forced to put a 253W CPU into their machine, but it's great that the vendors are making them available for those who want them.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Yurop:
https://weatherspark.com/y/68301/Average-Weather-in-Hamburg-...
https://weatherspark.com/y/74001/Average-Weather-in-Copenhag...
USA:
https://weatherspark.com/y/18622/Average-Weather-in-Miami-Fl...
https://weatherspark.com/y/20957/Average-Weather-in-Washingt...
Straightforward day/night electricity rates have existed for decades, hourly rates are more recent, and optional.
100¢/kWh has happened in the last month, but only at a peak period. I'm not sure how long or how often it happened.
1.00DKK = 0.14USD
https://andelenergi.dk/kundeservice/aftaler-og-priser/timepr...
Alder Lake impresses me, but Ryzen is the better choice because f Intel heh
As much as I want to agree on Ryzen, Intel is still the best platform for low-latency audio stuff. So I hope that performance-per-watt is or will be good as I'm beginning to get that PC-building itch. I'm curious what its idle usage is like.
But my living-room PC has a third-gen Ryzen (I built it just before the pandemic hit) and have been super pleased with its performance.
I did find https://linustechtips.com/topic/1238719-low-latency-cpu-for-...
edit - Sound on Sound with a bit more detail https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/core-wars-amd-inte...
Modern hardware is really difficult to permanently damage as long as you don’t go full “manual OC” - in that case many protections may be disabled, and you can certainly get Ryzens to overheat and die like that.
Thankfully all-in-one kits for that which are pre filled and sealed are much more commonplace than they used to be, and even fairly cheap midtower ATX cases I see on newegg in the $60-70 range will have a top panel mounting place for a 280mm radiator.
And definitely any "gaming" marketed ATX case above that price range will have the capability for it.
You possibly could get away with a 240mm length radiator (dual 120mm fans) on something like this but I really wouldn't recommend it, and the savings for an AIO kit would be only $50-60.
From the perspective of noise annoyance, fan pitch and sound is somewhat proportional to size. 140mm fans can be a lot quieter and move more air than 120mm with less perceptible noise to the human sitting next to it.
Higher end stuff will be implemented by 360mm length radiator (3 x 140mm) which I am pleasantly surprised to see not ridiculously priced ATX cases having options mounting now.
I would figure you have to budget an additional $150-200 on top of the CPU cost for a capable water cooling loop setup. Which is not absolutely ridiculous considering that a really good skived copper heatsink/heatpipe/fan setup for pure air cooling on a 130W TDP CPU could easily be $65.