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For me, it's not the MSRP cost, it's that they've thrown power efficiency out the window entirely. It'd be like that automaker's flagship car getting only 2 miles per gallon on highways. Granted, that comparison makes the vehicle functionally useless anywhere but a drag strip, but that's not the point I am focusing on, I'm arguing the lack of focus on achieving performance with efficiency. These new GPUs and even CPUs are entirely about power and performance. The upfront cost is one thing, but the long term cost of the both the energy consumption and central air system having to handle the massive thermal load is getting out of hand, particularly in a hotter region. It's severely overlooked or just lightly complained about as "this thing needs cooling" without really elaborating what that entails or means. It's one thing to cool down a large studio area with a commercial HVAC system for doing youtube videos, but it's another to try and cool a bedroom in a house with the normal central air system. I just wish these PC component manufactures would have some more focus on making their products more energy efficient, do more with less. You can always do more by consuming more, that's less impressive. And to go back to cars. Take a huge engine, and one half its size, both output the same power, but one uses a third as much of the same fuel. Which one is more impressive? I understand flagship is the extreme edge. But when the power consumption of the flagships keep increasing, it normalizes the lower and mid ranges to also keep increasing. I just want to see a focus on efficiency, stop doing more with more. Do more with less instead. |
Flagship cars generally do get significantly worse gas mileage than mainstream cars.
But you're exaggerating the inefficiency of a 4090. In terms of performance-per-watt, it's not that far off from their lower level cards.
If low power is a primary driver, it's very easy to move a slider and reduce the power usage for any of these cards.
> I just wish these PC component manufactures would have some more focus on making their products more energy efficient,
They do! Efficiency and performance are one in the same. They wouldn't be able to squeeze out this much performance if they didn't optimize the efficiency. More efficient parts result in higher performance for a given thermal envelope.
If you wanted the most efficiency, you would buy a 4090 and turn the power limit down to 50%. This is very easy to do. Reducing voltage and power limits is extremely common in small case builds.