Reducing Energy Costs - Graphics and System Related

[Uriel]

Something I've been very surprised to see, as an energy saving feature, is the power of VSync, in conjunction with the power-saving features on recent CPUs and GPUs. It seems clear that the power-saving capacity of vSync will be less if your in-game framerate is fairly close to the monitor's refresh rate. But if your card is complete overkill for the game you're playing and your monitor, a lot of electricity can be saved. And therefore very recent cards that are overpowered for what you are playing will give the best power-saving results here.

The follow up is from Techpowerup's recent RTX 3050 review. These are 'card only' details and you can see details of how they get the data in the Power Consumption Testing Details in the review. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/msi-geforce-rtx-3050-gaming-x/36.html

Edit: for comparison, results with vSync off.

 

[Jono8]

Nope, was a bit canny and knew the price rises were coming so swapped providers to one of the big five (to avoid potential smaller company going bust) and have a fixed tarrif to 2024 before the price rises were announced.

Also have solar panels so working from home has not been a problem, yes winter is coming so less light but amount of power we use as both have laptops is small and I`m lucky if I get 2+ hrs gaming time in a day so doesnt really affect us that way.

Dont forget you can swap tarrifs before the end of your fix contract, just depends on how much the charge is to swap (mine was £5 per utility but even that I timed it right so it cost me nothing as mine finished September)

You mean you were lucky and your current deal ended in Sept, just before the prices sky rocketed.

Doesn't sound canny. Sounds fortunate.

 

[GuruJockStrap]

I'm on Economy 7 so tend to fire up any gaming sessions from 11am anyway to take advantage of the "cheaper" rate.

To be fair, my GPU hasn't been used in anger since before Christmas as work has gone a bit busy and I'm shattered in the evenings.

 

[Wrinkly]

If efficiency is of concern then consider cloud gaming, something such as Geforce Now. This would also allow the use of RT with older and / or AMD GPUs.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I still play Fallout 4 which is capped at default at 60FPS,and frequently dips below 60FPS in settlements,etc. So it has always been very energy efficient,as my GPU tends to be asleep.

 

[Curlyriff]

People are honestly worried about 7.5p per hour of gaming?

A monitor pulls 50w or so. An average GPU pulls 200w and an average cpu 65w.

If you have stupidly specced a 16 core CPU for gaming then that is on you.

I'm using a 5600x, 3080ti and a 32 inch Samsung odyssey G7. It will cost me around 7.5p per hour of gaming.

That means if I game for 10 hours per day which I don't it's 75p per day.

I literally spend more on soda water per day to drink. It's buttons the cost to run a gaming rig.

Em yeah when there 3 of us working 8am - 6pm. That means that the electric for the PC side has gone from £22 (10p/h, 10h day, 22days a month) to £57 a month just for work time. That over a year is £420 which is a significant amount increase with the new electric prices(PC's total are around 350watt total).

Edit: Saving 50w a PC then would mean a potential year saving of £108 a year just for work time. Expect gaming is about 1/3rd again total time means £145 saved.

Edit 2: This is prior to the ever increasing price hike so that will be possibly another 50% on all these figures come April.

 

[Killer7xx]

Honestly just buy a U-series laptop as a daily driver and to play games like football manager. The AMD 6000 series APUs with RDNA2 graphics should be easily capable enough for that + some 1080p gaming while only using 15-25W.

 

[Ayahuasca]

I undervolt both the CPU and GPU nowadays although I don't bother measuring my usage in terms of what it costs me per year. I find once you go down the route of micromanaging every aspect of your finances, particularly hobbies, it turns everything into a chore. Know people at work who've got spreadsheets that even factor in how many times they boil the kettle

 

[Grim5]

Em yeah when there 3 of us working 8am - 6pm. That means that the electric for the PC side has gone from £22 (10p/h, 10h day, 22days a month) to £57 a month just for work time. That over a year is £420 which is a significant amount increase with the new electric prices(PC's total are around 350watt total).

Edit: Saving 50w a PC then would mean a potential year saving of £108 a year just for work time. Expect gaming is about 1/3rd again total time means £145 saved.

Edit 2: This is prior to the ever increasing price hike so that will be possibly another 50% on all these figures come April.

That feel when saving a 100 quid over a year is worth the effort. Plus wfh saves way more than that in petrol cost, parking cost and car maintenance but w/e it's your money. Been working from home every week day for the last 6 months now and I've saved well over a thousand in maintenance, fuel, parking and insurance

 

[Poneros]

Yo Poneros, for your Rx 6800, make it more efficient.
AMD RX 6800 Overclocking and Undervolting - from over 240 watts to under 180 watts, it’s all there | igor'sLAB (igorslab.de)

Use @ to ping people, like @kaiserc Thanks tho, saw it before, but unfortunately for me tweaking the voltage is not working well on this card, and hasn't much in the past except for my Vega 64 which was actually an exceptional undervolter. I do use vsync & frame caps so it still works out well. Right now for example I'm playing the new league in Path of Exile like mad and the game runs very well at 1080p 120fps and only hits the GPU SOC for about ~70w, but up to ~100w on rare occassion. In fact it's so good it stays <60° C so the fans don't even turn on lmao!

 

[Curlyriff]

That feel when saving a 100 quid over a year is worth the effort. Plus wfh saves way more than that in petrol cost, parking cost and car maintenance but w/e it's your money. Been working from home every week day for the last 6 months now and I've saved well over a thousand in maintenance, fuel, parking and insurance

But none of us would be driving to work. We can walk or cycle to work so there is no cost savings there to be had.

 

[Donnie Fisher]

I’ve been thinking along the lines of what could I save, but I figure that to get a system that would significantly reduce its base power usage for day to day tasks, I would be spending a chunk of money that may not see a return against the increase of electricity costs.

for example, my rack server nas /cctv unit runs at 70w with 6 hdds in it. To lower that I’d have to either buy an costly nas which would likely still run about 40w, or a desktop setup which again would run about the same. 30w saving is going to take a long time to pay back those investment costs.

 

[Grim5]

But none of us would be driving to work. We can walk or cycle to work so there is no cost savings there to be had.

True, may be different for you guys (I sometimes forget how tightly packed the UK is), I'd have to cycle 50km per day lol. WFH saves me a significant sum of money

 

[Curlyriff]

True, may be different for you guys (I sometimes forget how tightly packed the UK is), I'd have to cycle 50km per day lol. WFH saves me a significant sum of money

Last year at previous job I was travelling 96km each way so that was costing me £400 a month in fuel. But for last 12 months it is no different.

 

[Uriel]

Something here on what vsync can do for the Steam Deck battery life... https://www.pcgamer.com/the-steam-deck-can-drain-its-battery-in-90-minutes-if-you-dont-cap-your-fps/

 

[Tired9]

Capping my FPS in games that I really don't need to be at max refresh for bring my RTX 3070 power consumption way down. For example The Long dark maxed out at 2560x1440 with an FPS cap of 75 the GPU ranges from 87-95 watts vs 223 watts average at 170FPS.

 

[willhub]

I've put my 3080ti to stock and upped the power limit, only does 340W max anyway and supplements the radiator behind it.

 

[Grim5]

Capping my FPS in games that I really don't need to be at max refresh for bring my RTX 3070 power consumption way down. For example The Long dark maxed out at 2560x1440 with an FPS cap of 75 the GPU ranges from 87-95 watts vs 223 watts average at 170FPS.

There is a lot of power savings to be had on Nvidia cards if the game prefers to use cores over clocks. I play a lot of games with rtss overlay and I've noticed that some games will only use some of the cores but run them at full clocks and some games will use all the gpu cores it can get and is happy to run those clocks at low speed if the performance is meeting your frame cap

Why this behaviour is important is because Nvidia GPU power draw is massively affected by the clock speed but has an incredibly tiny amount of impact from using lots of cores. So if you can find a sweet spot in a game where you are using all your cores but at low clocks you can save big time - I've encountered games that make my 3090 use 200watts to get 60fps and then 420watts to get 70fps, the difference can be that massive and in this particular example the game was running all cores in use but only at 1600mhz for 60fps and at 70fps it went up to 2050mhz.


But it's not possible in all games, I've played games that I can cap at 60fps, where it would do 200fps uncapped and yet at the 60fps my 3090 is still using 420watts - what happens here is that the game only uses like 20 to 40% of the cores but tells the gpu to run all the cores at max clock speed and as I mentioned before on Nvidia GPU clock speed affects power draw and not the number of cores used.


So because this behaviour can seem random and game specific, the easiest way to save power on Nvidia GPU is then in fact to simply lower the maximum clock speed and reduce the voltage curve - just introducing a 60fps frame cap doesn't work in all games

 

[mid_gen]

On the plus side....the energy price increases are going to seriously hit miners.

My next job I'll be remoting in to my workstation instead of having this dual-xeon monstrosity chewing through electric, which is a timely saving.

 

[Grim5]

On the plus side....the energy price increases are going to seriously hit miners.

My next job I'll be remoting in to my workstation instead of having this dual-xeon monstrosity chewing through electric, which is a timely saving.

Your workplace doesn't give you a laptop or nuc to connect to a server or something with high performance remote computing?