[burmanm]

Is it? Why?

My machine is entirely silent on normal operations (Zen 3 5600X and RX 6700). All the fans, on both GPU and CPU are stopped in desktop usage. And it doesn't obviously eat that much power (my monitor probably eats more).

The only moment I could hear them is if I play games. And then I have headset on, so I can't hear them.

I really couldn't care less if it ate twice the amount of power when playing games.

[pdpi]

> Is it? Why?

Because, while gaming, the vents in my case blow air at over 40 degrees Celsius, and that heat has to go somewhere. Absent a setup that can put the case several meters away from me, that "somewhere" is on top of me.

[ilyt]

Flip it 180 degrees ? Cases are designed to blow the air into the back, not to have back facing the user...

[waboremo]

You should care because you're paying for that energy use lol

[burmanm]

In the end that sum it takes energy during gaming is meaningless. I spend more on coffee while playing than to electricity.

[waboremo]

Right, and you could have afforded better/more coffee with the savings costs to consuming less power. Which is the point: energy costs are not 0. These costs vary depending on which devices you play on, regardless of games. Someone playing the same games as you on PS5 rather than a gaming PC, is going to save enough money to then buy another indie game per month or more coffees in that month than you.

Note: this isn't about debating which platform is best, rather understanding power consumption impact and the cost to your budget.

Are these costs major? Life changing? Absolutely not. But you should care about them and make decisions incorporating them, not ignoring it as if power consumption is irrelevant even if doubled!

[burmanm]

In the end, living on northern region (Finland), my PC power costs in reality are meaningless. My gaming probably eats what.. few hundred kWh per year? Lets say 1000kWh to make something meaningful. 1000kWh is less than the yearly fluctuation of electricity consumption of the house in heating costs. It's less than my Tesla's winter consumption fluctuation depending on the amount of heating the battery / car requires for me to open the doors.

See the insanity of optimizing couple of watts from PC? I don't play 12 hours a day, I play after work in the evenings - at best few hours a day, but not every day.

My workstation's power usage does not have any impact on my life. Even if doubled, tripled, quadruppled, it would be lost in margins of everything else where I use electricity.

PS5 eats about the same amount of power to be fair (or my XSX) so there's not much to save here. Also, they're a bit slower than my desktop and do not provide the flexibility.

Proper gaming performance requires power as no one has invented any golden goose to reduce it (not AMD, not NVIDIA, not Apple) at the same performance. I'd even wonder if Apple's usage of GPU in M2 Ultra is that power efficient when looking at the real world games as the fps counters are so low.

Theoretical performance is pointless in the end if it doesn't actually crunch anything that fast in reality. Maybe the glue architecture is only nice on paper and that's why Apple after years of ignoring specs is now only advertising specs on their GPU parts, not what it could do.

[tester756]

Depends what's the trade off

Can additional performance allow me to do more while e.g gaming?

Like doing some stuff in the background, having VMs, IDEs, Dockers running?