[giobox]

This is slowly changing IMO - I'm seeing concern over energy use even on forums discussing high end hardware builds as cost of energy mounts in Europe. Previously no one really ever mentioned this other than to laugh at poor thermals.

If some of Nvidia's next generation 4xxx series GPUs are close to 1000w draw as many rumors suggest, the total draw of a high spec Intel/Nvidia system is going to probably have similar running costs to an electric space heater when playing demanding games. The existing 3090ti is already a 500w part, which not so long ago was enough to power a whole system in addition to the GPU.

[nightski]

The power cost of running my enthusiast build is on the order of a few dollars a month.

Now I am all for being green but there are things in my household that are much more of a concern than this.

Huge datacenters full of these chips is one thing. A personal computer for hacking & gaming probably not such a big deal.

[gambiting]

Yeah that's not true, at least here in the UK it isn't. My normal build will use 500W when gaming, so every couple hours that's £0.40. Every 10 hours is £4. That's just few days of gaming for me, not including all the other computer use, definitely adds up over a month, especially since my bills used to be £100/month now they are £300 a month.

[lmm]

Using your own numbers, if you're spending 200/month more on gaming then that's 500 hours/month or approximately every waking hour. Are you really gaming that much? And even if you are, that's a lot cheaper than practically any other hobby you could spend that much time on.

[gambiting]

I never said I spend £200 on gaming? I just said that my bills have increased from 100 a month to 300, but that's due to rising energy costs in the UK, not my gaming habits . It's more that in addition to my bill literally tripling, costs of gaming aren't insignificant for me. It doesn't matter that it's still cheap for the type of entertainment - it adds up. Ever pound spend this way is not a pound spent on something else.

[lmm]

> It's more that in addition to my bill literally tripling, costs of gaming aren't insignificant for me. It doesn't matter that it's still cheap for the type of entertainment - it adds up. Ever pound spend this way is not a pound spent on something else.

Sounds like a route to being penny-wise and pound-foolish. If you cut cheap entertainment you may well end up spending more (because in practice it's very hard to just sit in a room doing nothing), and if your gaming costs are a lot smaller than your energy bills then the cost should be relatively insignificant, almost by definition.

[gambiting]

Well the discussion started with saying "why would enthusiasts care about their energy consumption" - so my point isn't that I'm going to cut out entertainment altogether, but for my next GPU I will definitely look at the energy consumption and there is zero chance I'm buying a 500W monster, even if I can afford the energy for it. It's just stupid and wasteful. I might go with a xx60 series instead, just because the TDP will be more reasonable. Or alternatively I might play the same games on my Xbox Series S which provides me with the same entertainment yet uses 1/6th of the energy of my PC when gaming.

[black_knight]

Also, considering that the used power becomes heat, it is not such a waste if you already have inefficient electrical heating.

[epolanski]

Conversely, it makes summer much worse.

[redeeman]

perhaps.. you can easily equalize indoor temperature to outdoors, so if you're not cooling, it makes no difference.

sucks if you run an AC though :)

[epolanski]

I don't use AC I think it's terrible to waste energy like that. I can understandan office or hospital, but home?

I'm from southern italy, it's hot, you sweat, you don't need to burn gas, coal or build infrastructure so people waste it to cool their room, this is so entitled and no wonder we're in full climate crisis.

People can't give up on anything really. It gets worse everyday and people's remedy is to make it even worse,. Nonsense.

So yes, it makes things much worse with a hot pc in the room.

[barrkel]

24h x 30 days x .5kW x 0.25 CHF/kWh gives me 90 CHF a month to run my PC, assuming it never sleeps.

Have you run the calculation? It's worthwhile configuring suspend for PCs these days. My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.

[PragmaticPulp]

> 24h x 30 days x .5kW

No modern PC should be pulling 500W all the time.

Idle power can be as low as 20-30W depending on the build.

You should also allow it to sleep, of course.

> My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.

Something is wrong. A 3090 should only pull about 20 Watts at idle: https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-review-... . You might have some process forcing it into full-speed 3D mode for some reason.

[hulitu]

Windows indexing service.

[loeg]

> 500W

500W is a very high average power consumption. And my electricity is 0.13 USD/kWh, which is about half 0.25 CHF/kWh.

True average power is probably below 100W, for a total cost in the realm of 10 CHF or USD per month.

[Someone]

In the USA, for a significant part of the year, chances are you have to add the electricity costs of running your airconditioning to get rid of that heat.

If you’re living in a colder state, you may have to subtract the costs of having lower heating costs.

[loeg]

Sure, although it's not a ton of heat either way and doesn't make a large impact on the net cost.

[epolanski]

The lowest contract you can get in italy is 40 cents.

Also, consuming more energy is bad and this rush to apologize lack of innovation in gpu and cpus weve seen in the last decade is ridiculous.

Where does it end? I'm okay with a 5000cc truck because airplanes and cruise ships are much worse?

[LegitShady]

the last 2-3 generations of cpus and gpus have seen the most innovation, efficiency, and performance gains in a long time.

If you don't want to drive a 5l truck, don't drive one, but 500W is not an average load, and if you have high electricity costs thats a you problem not an everyone else problem.

The largest parts of my electrical bill are distribution and overhead charges that don't change whether I use power or not. The marginal utility of the power vs the cost is quite reasonable.

[giobox]

This is nonsense. The last 2-3 generations of GPUs have seen nothing of the sort in terms of efficiency, the same is also true of many Intel desktop CPUs. The latest Alder Lake desktop parts from Intel have been universally criticized for power draw too.

Each of the last 4 generations of mid to high-end card from Nvidia has required more electricity than the last. By Nvidia's own admission, their future chips will get larger and hotter to some extent due to slow down in moore's law and future process nodes being harder to reach. The die size of the parts has also grown which does not help.

Its not a small trajectory either; 4 years ago the most power hungry consumer part from Nvidia was a 1080ti which would easily draw 250w under load. today that number is now 500w for the current 3090ti, and rumored to be 800-1000 for the 4xxx parts launching end of this year. A GPU often will sit at peak draw for hours at a time in games as they try to push as many FPS as possible.

A current gaming machine with recent components can easily exceed 500w constant load during gameplay, and this figure will rise again with the 4xxx parts.

The ONLY exception to this really is Apple devices, and even then its not clear we can compare an M1/M2 GPU to the fastest parts Nvidia offer.

[epolanski]

You and me are seeing very different news if you dont see midrange gpus consumimg 250w under load and cpus getting over 100.

The performance gains are non existent and largely driven by bigger and bigger chips on smaller nodes.

There is no innovation in gpu and x86 cpus space since a long time, that happens only on arm nowadays.

[jamiek88]

>5000cc truck because airplanes and cruise ships are much worse

Oh boy, you should visit USA sometime. A 5 liter truck is the small one.

[xani_]

The fuck are those calculations ? Are you trying to mislead people on purpose?

Who is running their computer at 500W 24/7 ?

[bufferoverflow]

500W 24/7 consumption? What do you do? Train ML non-stop?

Your example is in now representative of reality.

[nightski]

I use suspend on my PC and I definitely do not run it 24h, or anywhere close to that. Also power is $0.08/kWh where I live.

[gambiting]

That's insanely cheap power, use it while you can. I'm paying £0.40/kWh, so about 46 cents per kWh.

[brewdad]

Really?

My power is some of the cheapest in the country and we pay ~13 cents/kWh. It's a little misleading though since my bill breaks out generation and distribution costs into separate line items. They are both billed per kWH though and add up to 13 cents.

[nightski]

Yes. We have a fixed basic connection charge of $20. So it's really close to your $0.13/kWh when that is taken into account.

I wasn't trying to be misleading though because the point is the basic charge does not increase with usage. So for each additional kWh we add to that it's only $0.089/kWh.

[brewdad]

No, that's fair. I have an additional basic charge too. Congrats on the cheap power.

[maccard]

And double that number if you're in the UK.

[chris11]

It's worse than that. Gamer's Nexus had a video a few months ago about power transients becoming a bigger problem. Power spikes can double the amount of power needed. It doesn't really impact average power useage, but it can cause a psu's ocp to shut down the machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnRyyCsuHFQ

[kllrnohj]

> If some of Nvidia's next generation 4xxx series GPUs are close to 1000w draw as many rumors suggest

Those rumors are for millisecond long transient spikes, not an average of anything. So basically the rumor is a 500w peak load. Just like how the current 350-400w GPUs have transient spikes to upwards of 800w. It's not a problem in terms of power consumption (although obviously the increase from 400w to 500w would be), rather it's an issue with over-current protection in power supplies tripping. It's a "need bigger capacitors" type problem.

[gambiting]

Yeah exactly this. I have a 3080 with a 5900X, would consider myself an enthusiast, and after recent price hike to my tariff here in the UK electricity usage is definitely something that's on my mind. Like, it hasn't stopped me gaming yet, but I'm very acutely aware that I'm using £1 worth of electricity every few hours of play - it adds up.

[bufferoverflow]

> £1 worth of electricity every few hours of play

I hope you make a lot more per hour of work. Stop worrying about that.

[gambiting]

I mean, thank you for the thoughtful advice about my finances, but it doesn't help in the slightest. Life is getting a LOT more expensive lately, with everything going up in price - I'm seeing my grocery bills double, energy bills triple, spending lots more money on petrol, on eating out, on taking my family out for trips, and yes - on gaming too. Is that £1 every few hours making me destitute? No, absolutely not and I'm extremely privileged to be able to afford it. But at the same time every £1 taken for this isn't a pound saved, or spent on my kid, or on literally anything other more productive.

So yes, I can "easily" afford it, but it doesn't mean that the energy consumption of my gaming rig hasn't affected how I think about it. Any future hardware upgrades will also be impacted by this - there is no way I'm buying a GPU with 500W TDP, even if again, I can afford the energy bills.

[epolanski]

Whether he does or not it's none of your business, and it doesn't change the fact that those are high prices and sources of environmental issues.

This power draw is getting out of hand on desktop, consoles and x86 laptops and is largely a symptom of lack of competition and lack of technological advances.

[lmm]

> those are high prices

By any reasonable measure they're not. £1 for "a few hours" of fun is a very cheap hobby.

[2fast4you]

And probably the heat output of a space heater as well. I had to move my tower into another room because it kept the whole room way too hot

[xen2xen1]

The pilot light on my furnace went out years ago. I only noticed because when I opened the door to the room with my computer a light but noticeable heat blast hit me. It took a second, but I turned around and checked my furnace, etc instead of going in the room. It really was a revelation about how much heat those things produce.