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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine trying to run a LAN party at a typical residence with a room full of modern, high-end gaming PCs... I thought we were saved on power consumption when we went from CRT to LCD, but nothing can compensate for the madness we are working with now.

Back in the early 00's, I've had 20A breakers trip with ~8 high-end PCs on the same circuit. Today, I think we would struggle to handle half the number of PCs. My entire panel is only good for 150A of service, so I am wondering if I could even fill up a battlefield match before my main trips.

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The high end these days is insane. Huge diminishing returns in performance/watt and performance/cost. My current mid-range gaming PC (Ryzen 5600X, Radeon 6700XT) uses about the same amount of power as my 2008 mid-range PC (Core2 Q6600, GeForce 8800 GTS 512) while of course running laps around it in performance. Unfortunately this current generation across the board seems to be throwing GHz at the problem as if we didn't learn our lesson from Pentium 4.

I seem to recall things getting worse before the industry swung back into sane specs. The bulldozer era cpus were toasters that could do 5-6 ghz and both amd and nvidia made high power gpus with 2 chips on a single board.

>My entire panel is only good for 150A of service, so I am wondering if I could even fill up a battlefield match before my main trips.

Keep in mind, while the US uses 120V at the outlet, virtually all residential service is 240V (typically two phases of 120V), so in theory your home has 240V@150A=36 kilowatts of peak capacity. With some high gauge extension cords to distribute the load to different circuits in your house, you'll likely run out of space or friends before you run out of power.

I hosted a LAN party earlier this year, and I did exactly this! Bunch of extension cords to distribute the load across the breakers

> typically two phases of 120V

It's still single phase, one AC sine wave. The transformer supplies power using three current carrying conductors, two hots, and a neutral. The voltage, or potential difference, between the two hots is 240V. The neutral is a center tap on the transformer, and the voltage between each of the hots and the neutral is 120V. This allows circuits to use either or both 120/240V.

You are correct, however, in your math for total capacity.

The high end is down from the peak. Quad SLI GTX 980 used to require a separate power supply just for the graphics cards.

I think it depends how you count it.

According to this setup their under load power consumption of the entire system was just shy of 700Ws https://pcper.com/2014/10/nvidia-gtx-980-3-way-and-4-way-sli...

Back then components didn't tend to be as power bursty so I think it matters whether you compare peak power consumption or average power consumption under "typical" load.

A wall load from a gaming PC with a 4090 and 13900k is definitely going to burst passed 700Ws, but average while playing a game is probably lower than that.

Yea, Stock GTX 980 wasn’t that bad however the GTX 980 Ti was significantly more power hungry.

That said, that review mentioned several very power hungry SLI setups.

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