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Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

As a home consumer though why would I care about power consumption. What is that like a few extra dollars in power per month?

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Power costs vary wildly from country to country, let alone state to state in the US. [1]

Also, many more people are installing solar power residential batteries, so there’s that.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...

PC power consumption is an important metric for those with backup power systems, especially in countries with infrequent electricity delivery (e.g. South Africa).

If you can afford a 320W CPU in the first place, you can probably afford the batteries to power the thing for a few hours, but it does still add a considerable amount to your backup costs.

fwiw a 320w cpu isn't running at 320w all of the time. if you're powering something off of batteries in a consumer situation, a 240w vs 320w cpu isn't going to move the needle unless you're really running it hard (like a game)

For an ordinary consumer UPS that's not trying to keep the system up for hours but just a few minutes, the peak power consumption probably matters more than the average: a 750VA UPS might simply trip its overcurrent protection if you're unlucky enough to have a power outage coincide with a spike in system load. With a big enough GPU, even a 1000VA unit might not be safe.

And it might be hard to get your system configured to throttle itself quickly enough when the power goes out: having the UPS connected over USB to a userspace application that monitors it and changes Windows power plans in response to going on battery could be too slow to react. It's a similar problem to what gaming laptops face, where they commonly lose more than half of their GPU performance and sometimes a sizeable chunk of CPU performance when not plugged in, because their batteries cannot deliver enough current to handle peak load.

The baseline draw is still much higher than lower spec alternatives, and it means you would need to cater for the high end scenario in your battery estimations if you intend to actually use it during power outages.

I switched from a 5950X + 3080, to a 5700G APU, to finally an M1 MBP + Steam Deck last year for this exact reason. Far cheaper to have a 250wh battery that can handle those two for the ±2h outages every day.

I am in a western country with good power. Again why would I care?

It's not always about you.

Then get a low power processor. There’s no reason power consumption should really come up as a prime selling point in any discussion regarding home usage. Obviously when you do things at scale in a data center it makes sense to talk about.

Your original post was to ask why should anyone care about power draw, to which I provided an answer.

Now you shift goalposts to saying you should only care in data centre contexts, in a thread discussing a desktop processor.

It's okay if power consumption doesn't matter to you, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter to everyone. That's why it's important to have these metrics in the first place and ideally to try and optimise them.

Dont forget cooling. The 14900ks almost requires good watercooling to get its full potential.

I care because I don't like noisy computers and I don't like to run a space heater during summer.

Lower power consumption means less heat, which means less noise from cooling fans and lower temperature increase in my room.

YMMV

Maybe you don’t. But most other people do and so does Intel. It’s not good business to have a poor perf per watt chip in 2024. Everything from phones, laptops, to servers care very much about perf per watt except the very hardcore DIY niche that you might belong to.

Normal people dont know what perf per watt means dont be like that

I'm upvoting this to counter the downvotes because, unfortunately, normal people don't know.

Specifically, normal people don't know what "watt" is. Seriously. There is a reason electrician is a skilled profession. Most of us here do know watts and the like, so it's easy to forget that normal people aren't like us.

Normal people understand watts. Because they know what an electric heater is.

And using 2x to 3x more electricity means more heat in their room.

Also many countries have smart electricity meters with in home units which tell them exactly how many watts are currently being consumed and how much that costs them.

I’m going to push back on this with a simple example. Go to your local hardware store and check out the electric space heater section. There will be a wide variety of units rated for small rooms, medium rooms, and large rooms, based on square footage. The heaters will have a variety of form factors and physical dimensions. Many of them will have mentions of “eco” and “efficiency”. Every single one of them, and I mean literally, will be a 1500W heater (or whatever your region’s equivalent maximum load per plug is which may vary in 240v countries). Exact same wattage, all 100% efficient because their only job is to produce heat, with wildly different dimensions and text on the box. Customers will swear up and down about the difference between these units.

I had to do this after my gas costs went well above my electric costs. Maybe you are in a country/area where your hardware store doesn’t supply a variety of heaters, but at my local store, no two models were the same wattage.

It grinds my gears that electric lawn mowers are marketed by voltage even though that has no relation to grass cut per time.

Normal people know that 60w bulb can burn you.

Do they? Even I have problem nowadays with this, because they write 60W but it's a LED and it acts like a 60W bulb but it's not 60W. 60W is more like branding.

60w bulb can literally blind you (temporarily)these days.

They might not know the term "perf per watt" but they feel the heat, fan, noise, and speed on devices they use.

None of those are a problem on a desktop PC only on shitty laptops.

Do you have experience with modern high watagae CPU during summer? Yes, good cooler can make it work. But where does that heat end up? It gets blown out from the case and first heats your legs (depending on desk, position to wall, etc), and then the entire room. It can be very noticable and not in a good way.

>Do you have experience with modern high watagae CPU during summer?

i7 4790k w noctua cooler is fine :)

Do you have A/Cin that room?

I actually have a similar desktop next to my legs, only it has the Xeon version with twice the cores. It's an absolute PITA in the summer with no A/C. It's also quite noisy when the temperature in the room reaches 27 ºC.

Same cpu, not bothered to replace until maybe these days

I have 2 saved profiles in my bios, one where the cpu is allow to consume has much current as it want that I use from mid October to mid May and one where the CPU is capped at 65W for the rest of the year.

I do something similar with my GPU, 75% cap in the summer, 105% cap in the winter.

  None of those are a problem on a desktop PC only on shitty laptops.

My post specifically states the perf per watt advantage on laptops, phones, any small device, servers. I also mentioned this advantage being less on hardcore DIY computers.

Do you realise how big the PC gaming sector is these days? High performing desktop chips are not for the hardcore DIY enthusiast market anymore. There are now millions of gamers buying of the shelf PCs with the highest spec components as standard.

The reverse of what you said is true.

DIY desktop market is smaller than ever. You can see this in the number of discrete GPU sales which has drastically declined over the last 20 years[0] save for a few crypto booms.

Gaming laptops are now more popular than gaming desktops.[1]

If you disagree, I'd like to see your sources.

[0]https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/9hGBfdHQBWtrbYQKAfFZWD-120...

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20220628032503/https://www.idc.c...

Lokos like gaming laptop vs gaming desktop sales are roughly the same:

"In terms of market share, according to a 2020 report by Statista, Notebooks / laptops accounted for 46.8% of the global personal computer market, while desktop PC made up 40.6% of the market. The remaining market share was made up of other devices such as tablets and workstations."

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1119850/gaming-pc-market...

https://www.tech-bazaar.com/laptop-market-as-compared-to-des...

Why does it matter? It’s always plugged in and the cost difference is negligible.

So you're just going to waste for no reason? Do you also leave the faucet running when you brush your teeth? It's a few cents per month at most, after all.

It’s not for no reason, you’re getting more performance. It’s like saying everyone should buy a 4 cylinder Corolla for every situation, including tractors used in farms.

The context is precisely that there are other, power-efficient options that are at least as performant.

For me it's about having a silent PC and not making the room feel like a sauna.

I have a Ryzen 7950X in ECO mode 105W that's very fast in every workload I can throw at it, trivial to run whisper quiet with a basic Noctua cooler, and barely warms the room.

Maybe your morals guide you to act to mitigate the climate crisis, or maybe you don't have air conditioning and get hot summers.

Get off your high horse. This is negligible power usage on any scale of things.

In the US, not known for its frugality, "Residential daily consumption of electricity is 12 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per person."

Freedom is consuming as much electricity as we desire. So long as we're happy to pay for it, of course. (I am.)

Freedom is also choosing to respect our environment and making a conscious effort not to waste our resources just for the hell of it.

Keyword there being choose. Freedom is the right to choose whether I buy more power or not, which I'm happy to pay.

I have no interest in living in your dictatorial world where everyone must hug trees.

Emitting CO2 does harm to others, not just yourself, so there's good grounds for regulating it.

You should of course prioritize low hanging fruit and eliminate flying, car use, meat, low efficiency housing, etc. But thinking that it's only worth doing these one at a time serially is a fallacy, as is getting stuck on the low impact of individual actions. Dividing the emissions pie to insignificant slices and then arguing that nothing significant can be done is just fooling yourself into inaction.

Regarding horses, pointing out the emissions angle in response to "why would I care about power consumption" is basic table stakes in the world's current situation, no need to get offended.

power equals more heat. Water cooling and large heatsinks and loud fans are not desirable.

Noctua coolers and fans m8

Where do you think those fans blow the heat?

I am in Sweden summer is max 30C here... so not really an issue... for now...

I mentioned power just to round out three major complaints about the chip. Intel chips are more expensive, consume more electricity, and benchmark lower.

In general, as a home user, you should care about power consumption in desktop computers for the following reasons.

* Higher power requirements means more expense in other parts of the build. It means higher PSU requirements, and stronger cooling requirements.

* If you ever plan on running the PC on battery backup (UPS or Tesla Powerwall) or if you plan on installing solar energy then power consumption becomes a bigger expense.

> why would I care about power consumption

Environmental impact maybe? Higher power usage = more heat = more noise?

There’s a bunch of other cases too.

You are absolutely right, most home users don't care about power consumption when it comes to desktop computers.

All this negative shilling about power consumption of Intel and AMD desktop CPUs started after Apple ARM processors appeared on the desktop. Apple sells soldered SSD and CPUs with un-upgradeable RAM, and the proprietary SoC is no longer a true general purpose CPU as only macOS can run properly on it. Performance wise also they don't truly beat AMD (and in some cases Intel) processors. This is a huge negative factor for Apple Silicon based hardwares. Thus, the only negative marketing they can do about Intel and AMD processors is based on its higher power consumption.

That said, Intel and AMD will (and do seem) to care about power consumption for their laptop and server segments.

Apple’s chips are well regarded simply because they’re laptop chips - which they excel at because that’s where power consumption matters.

You can run Linux and openbsd on Apple M series chips, what do you mean only macOS?

Linux and *bsd run crippled on M series chips as Apple doesn't provide the hardware specifications or device APIs for system programmers for utilising the GPU etc on its SoC. Linux developers are forced to reverse engineer everything for the Apple Silicon because Apple is hostile to system developers. This in in sharp contrast to Intel or AMD processors where these OSes can fully utilise the chip hardware to deliver maximal performance, because Intel and AMD are more open with their hardware literature.

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