I would say that people who regularly invest in top end hardware don't care as much about power bills. Otherwise power efficient chips is the norm (laptops, phones, etc).
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.
It adds up, especially in data centers where you end up needing even more megawatts of power and cooling capacity.
Not yet!