Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic. The amount of people willing to put up with big honking machines is dwindling.
May I assume that you haven't used a desktop from some year equivalent to whatever Mac you use? Because modern desktops are far from "honking."
I have a 7950x (the high core count desktop offering). AMD require (sans one brand) water-cooling for it. That means you get big quiet fans, which are far less "honking" than the tiny loud ones that are in laptops by necessity. In fact, due to the nice large radiators that liquid coolers have the fans don't spin at all the majority of the time.
When I do need power, it's on-tap.
My 6900xt is big honking during gaming, but you can get real quiet $300 GPUs. Or just use the integrated graphics and enjoy the quiet liquid cooling.
> big
High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output. My living room is usually 3-4 degrees hotter around my desk than it is by the dining table.I'm looking to upgrade my gaming PC, and getting the power budget under control is surprisingly challenging.
I have a AMD 7700X and I run it on Eco Mode which is approx 65W TDP instead of the 105W TDP it wants to run at.
For my general use (including cpu intensive operations) this makes absolutely no perceivable difference. I ran some benchmarks out of curiosity and I take about a 5% haircut for a massive power and heat savings.
What Intel and AMD did with the chips was essentially sell consumers a default overclocked chip that will run to the max of the thermal headroom that your fan will allow and sit there. They did this to be competitive with each other in benchmarks for marketing.
Most consumers should run these chips in some sort of eco mode since the performance per watt has severe diminishing returns and they are actually quite power efficient as long as you don't run it on the default factory overclocked settings.
Many gamers, like me, probably also use their display for things aside from gaming. For non-gaming computer work I like 4K w/ a high (120hz ideally) refresh rate for well rendered text and smoother movement. But as I also then want to use this monitor for gaming, I need a gaming system that supports this.
TLDR; you might need a current gen chip for reasons other than gaming.
Technically true, but vacuously. The limit of a standard US circuit is 1500w, which is why you see all space heaters and the good PSUs hitting the figure
You can drastically reduce the power you supply to desktop chips with BIOS settings. You'll generate far less heat, can use a smaller power supply and form factor, while still getting great performance.
If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2 while power throttled, things get interesting.
For me this was going from 105W to 65W on my 7700X and my results were similar.
Not sure how it would look or work with Intel though.
Another point is that in terms of power efficiency AMD are absolutely mopping the floor with Intel, where even older high power R9s are consistently outperforming Intel's lower power i5 and i7s by a wide margin. This sort of discussion is often left out of reviews which only look at TDP or peak wall power. It's still not ARM levels of efficiency, but x86 vs ARM or even desktop vs laptop efficiency is an entirely separate conversation.
> If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2 while power throttled, things get interesting.
For laptop users, maybe. For desktop extra 40W literally doesn't matter.
My machine is entirely silent on normal operations (Zen 3 5600X and RX 6700). All the fans, on both GPU and CPU are stopped in desktop usage. And it doesn't obviously eat that much power (my monitor probably eats more).
The only moment I could hear them is if I play games. And then I have headset on, so I can't hear them.
I really couldn't care less if it ate twice the amount of power when playing games.
Because, while gaming, the vents in my case blow air at over 40 degrees Celsius, and that heat has to go somewhere. Absent a setup that can put the case several meters away from me, that "somewhere" is on top of me.
Note: this isn't about debating which platform is best, rather understanding power consumption impact and the cost to your budget.
Are these costs major? Life changing? Absolutely not. But you should care about them and make decisions incorporating them, not ignoring it as if power consumption is irrelevant even if doubled!
Can additional performance allow me to do more while e.g gaming?
Like doing some stuff in the background, having VMs, IDEs, Dockers running?
See the insanity of optimizing couple of watts from PC? I don't play 12 hours a day, I play after work in the evenings - at best few hours a day, but not every day.
My workstation's power usage does not have any impact on my life. Even if doubled, tripled, quadruppled, it would be lost in margins of everything else where I use electricity.
PS5 eats about the same amount of power to be fair (or my XSX) so there's not much to save here. Also, they're a bit slower than my desktop and do not provide the flexibility.
Proper gaming performance requires power as no one has invented any golden goose to reduce it (not AMD, not NVIDIA, not Apple) at the same performance. I'd even wonder if Apple's usage of GPU in M2 Ultra is that power efficient when looking at the real world games as the fps counters are so low.
Theoretical performance is pointless in the end if it doesn't actually crunch anything that fast in reality. Maybe the glue architecture is only nice on paper and that's why Apple after years of ignoring specs is now only advertising specs on their GPU parts, not what it could do.
>big honking machines
Buy an all-in-one water cooler for the CPU https://pcpartpicker.com/product/2PFKHx/arctic-liquid-freeze...
It's easy to install and you have a quiet, well-cooled CPU.
Similar here, there's not much room left when you've got a NH-D15 and EVGA 3080 Ti FTW3 installed.
This is more of an inadequacy on the part of motherboard manufacturers, though. PCI-E latches don't have to be terrible… look at the system Apple uses in their 2019 and 2023 Mac Pro towers for example which remain accessible regardless of what you have installed.
I saw that during shaders compile in RPCX3, pretty hard to see it otherwise.
Likewise, I'm not aware of any widescale issues with AIOs leaking. This seems like just as much of a problem as regular CPU coolers that need to have dust removed (i.e., not a problem).