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Power, heat, cost and noise. Your thoughts?

Troezar

Troezar

Troezar

Soldato
Joined
6 Aug 2009
Posts
7,276
Personally I find the electricity cost a bit of a red herring. You've just dropped £500+ on a GPU that depreciates like a holiday home in Greece and you worry about a few pounds more on power. Far more relevant is what the extra power consumed leads to, more energy wasted as heat. That heat had to be removed which can result in more fan noise and even when water cooling it has to go somewhere, usually into the room you're sitting in!

Obviously there is a trade off on ultimate processing power.

What are all your thoughts as I'm not sure cards are getting much cooler or quieter in absolute terms? They are for a given number of gflops but games and resolutions keep demanding more!

In conclusion I'd buy a more power efficient GPU but it wouldn't be to save a few quid or save the planet, cool and quiet are much important to me.
 
Here we go lol

Power consumption should be the least of worries on a enthusiast's forum especially a overclockers forum. Only time it comes into play is heat then noise generated from cooling.
 
Troezar said:
Personally I find the electricity cost a bit of a red herring. You've just dropped £500+ on a GPU that depreciates like a holiday home in Greece and you worry about a few pounds more on power. Far more relevant is what the extra power consumed leads to, more energy wasted as heat. That heat had to be removed which can result in more fan noise and even when water cooling it has to go somewhere, usually into the room you're sitting in!

Obviously there is a trade off on ultimate processing power.

What are all your thoughts as I'm not sure cards are getting much cooler or quieter in absolute terms? They are for a given number of gflops but games and resolutions keep demanding more!

In conclusion I'd buy a more power efficient GPU but it wouldn't be to save a few quid or save the planet, cool and quiet are much important to me.
Click to expand...

The point is how big is the difference?

The last few times we had the same argument here, was working that the more power efficient but expensive NV cards (780, Titan, 780Ti, TB) had to be used for 30 years at 6hours per day 365 days per year, to justify their higher pricing compared to the AMD cards they pit against at the period, assuming both cards run constantly at 100% speed.

Same applied to 970s, and 980s against the 390/390X where the difference was 25 years!!!!!

All this power efficiency is if you run on batteries. Saying that the new AMD cards are going to be significantly more power efficient than the NV ones, (by a big margin), which will make the use of 2 cards (eg RX480) easy without the need of 1000W platinum PSU the previous gen needed, while having more grunt power than the 1080, at less costs.

But thats a different story.
 
I'm not bothered about power usage, but the heat in my room is a concern. When I had my 290 crossfire setup my room would hit 30C which is pretty unpleasant.
 
Some funny answers. Please read again. I would prefer power efficiency for less heat and less noise. I clearly stated coll and quiet were the reasons not cost to run.

No wonder politicians speak in sound bites, no one seems to read and make sure they comprehend these days!
 
My number one issue with my gaming rigs is heat. Both are water cooled, but as you say the heat has to go somewhere and in my case, the bulk comes straight out of the top of the case. In the summer this can make the room quite uncomfortable, which ends up with me having to roll out the portable air con which is very noisy.
 
Troezar said:
Some funny answers. Please read again. I would prefer power efficiency for less heat and less noise. I clearly stated coll and quiet were the reasons not cost to run.

No wonder politicians speak in sound bites, no one seems to read and make sure they comprehend these days!
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Yea, it's like people just read the title and then start typing. Sadly quite normal.

Anyways, I agree with you. If high power usage leads to requiring ever fancy cooling to get temps reasonable and noise to a minimum, then it absolutely matters for many of us.

Another thing I think people overlook is just the appreciation of the technology behind it. That matters to many. Just like a car owner might brag about how the engine in their car gets 100hp per liter, a GPU enthusiast might feel good about how their card is getting 'x' performance out of 'y' watts. The end result to the user might not matter that much, but it ignores that enthusiast factor, where we just enjoy having products that are advanced and cutting edge. I dont see anything wrong with this, either.
 
My only concern about power consumption is if it is not high enough, the more the better !!!

I want performance, if I was worried about a few quid a year extra on the electricity bill I would use integrated graphics.

I want Pascal cards with 300watt TDP.
 
Kaapstad said:
My only concern about power consumption is if it is not high enough, the more the better !!!

I want performance, if I was worried about a few quid a year extra on the electricity bill I would use integrated graphics.

I want Pascal cards with 300watt TDP.
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Lol Kaap that's a lot of heat dumped into your room unless you have AC? I like SA but I don't want to game in African temps ;)
 
i hate heat anything over 60c on full load & i get paranoid . Thank god my 780 doesn't .
 
Well the upcoming cards should have lower TDP which should equate to lower temperatures and noise. It's expected but good news as GPU has always been the loudest component for me, and hottest.
 
Performance per watt is only interesting in as much as GPU makers dont want to create cards that use/generate as heat much more than 275w, so how much performance they can cram in to that spec is the limiting factor (as well as die size).
 
I'd expect any modern GPU to be as efficient as possible. The designers and manufacturers should be targeting lower power consumption - and consequently reduced heat and noise - as much as they can (within the realms of not significantly impacting performance, that is).
 
The thing to remember is we are the minority, enthusiast's like most of here are the minority, then people like kaap running multiple rigs, of 4 cards, are the minority of the minority.
We don't really care about power draw, but the rest of the world obviously does, else why would just about every electrical gadget on sale is banging on about how little power it uses, over the last version.
 
Troezar said:
Personally I find the electricity cost a bit of a red herring. You've just dropped £500+ on a GPU that depreciates like a holiday home in Greece and you worry about a few pounds more on power. Far more relevant is what the extra power consumed leads to, more energy wasted as heat. That heat had to be removed which can result in more fan noise and even when water cooling it has to go somewhere, usually into the room you're sitting in!

Obviously there is a trade off on ultimate processing power.

What are all your thoughts as I'm not sure cards are getting much cooler or quieter in absolute terms? They are for a given number of gflops but games and resolutions keep demanding more!

In conclusion I'd buy a more power efficient GPU but it wouldn't be to save a few quid or save the planet, cool and quiet are much important to me.
Click to expand...

You hit the nail on the head. When I moved from a 970/980 to a Titan X/980 Ti, I was left feeling really uncomfortable with how much noisier and hotter the latter cards were, and when I say uncomfortable, I mean literally uncomfortable, especially on a hot day.

That's why I'm super excited for the Hybrid 1080.
 
Troezar said:
What are all your thoughts as I'm not sure cards are getting much cooler or quieter in absolute terms?
Click to expand...

For a PC where the GPUs are to be used purely for gaming I don't really care how much power they use as long as I know about it up front. I do care - passionately - about the noise they create and I'm really pleased to see the power usage come down because that means that less cooling is needed.

Look at the huge coolers we put on our CPUs when they have half the TDP of a GPU that is often cooled by one 80mm or 92mm fan.
 
I can bearly hear my 980Ti when gaming and it sits around 67 - 73 game dependant and have a custom fan curve. I can just about hear it after gaming for a while and its touched 70. Then I can just about notice the fans slightly over my case fans and my pc isnt that noticable at idle. To me its a non issue. Only thing I will add is itdoes get noticably warm when gaming.
 
I do like having lower TDP cards, because of the noise and heat, the electricity is a bonus but its really a very small amount difference even over a year etc. over a few years it is significant but still not a lot. But higher TDP cards are faster so what can you do.
 
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