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by thehappypm 1384 days ago
253W is only 2 amps in the US, thats like 10-20% of a breaker’s capacity
3 comments

Peak draw for even a current-gen graphics card is well over 500W. There are rumors that a 4090 will need as much as a 1500W power supply to run it. That's almost a complete 15A circuit just for the PC once you factor in cooling, speakers, monitor etc.

I already have issues where the breaker would pop with my current gaming PC if it fully spins up and I had to get a 20A circuit put in to handle it (mostly because there is more than one computer on the circuit).

There are cards like that.

But you don't have to buy those cards. I play my games in QHD on a Radeon 6700XT 12GB, which tops out at about 165W.

I can't lie, the idea of needing a 30amp dedicated CB makes me feel happy as a nerd. Makes my power company happier..
With the GPU it's going to reach 51% at this rate. That's all it takes to require one per computer.
Just realized everyone's gonna have to turn their power targets down when running a LAN party. I gave my brother my old 2080ti, something would coil whine when he played Battlefield. We turned the card's power target down until the whine went away. We found at 35%, the whine stopped, and the performance difference was not easily discernable with a basic FPS counter just flying around a MP game.

Opportunity for software that dynamically adjusts CPU and GPU power targets in the middle of various games, learns the game's power/performance profile and whether it's CPU/GPU bottlenecked, and optimizes perf/watt while maintaining a given FPS target?

That's what Radeon Chill is.
I believe the new 4x nvidia series uses 450-500W.

Throw in 2 monitors and a speaker system and you're coming close to overloading your 15amp breaker.