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