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Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

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Re: Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

#161

Post by stirfish »

nitrogen wrote: post #146
jl6 wrote: post #27

I’ve always thought of gaming as a virtuous low-impact form of entertainment, insofar as it displaces real-world pursuits like foreign ski holidays, gasoline-powered road trips, or land-hogging golf courses. But burning nearly a kilowatt on a gaming rig feels like a step too far. Sure, the power could be sourced from wind or solar plants, but there’s still a level of excessive conspicuous consumption going on here th…

excessive conspicuous consumption Energy is a proxy for accomplishment and development. Humanity's #1 goal should be to maximize energy use per capita while minimizing energy use per activity, such that every human is doing as many desirable activities as possible. Gaming at 1kW for an hour costs 30 cents or less in electricity. As others have mentioned indirectly, going for a Sunday drive to see the changing leaves…

>minimizing energy use per activity

Maybe this is what feels off?

A kilowatt feels like too much for a videogame. This isn't a bitcoin mining thing, is it?

Re: Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

#162

Post by nottorp »

bruce343434 wrote: post #144
nottorp wrote: post #114

This is insane. Give me back the 75W GPUs instead. No extra power connector, just the slot.

APUs/integrated GPUs have taken up that role.

But I don't want a shit CPU. I can buy a 65 W 8C/16T CPU from AMD (which I need for more productive purposes). Why can't I pair it with a 75 W video card? Should be enough for 1080p gaming.

Re: Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

#163

Post by denton-scratch »

sp332 wrote: post #145
denton-scratch wrote: post #116

600 watts? That's one bar of a two-bar electric fire; in my youth, that two-bar fire was the only thing keeping some families warm. I mean, that power all gets turned into heat anyway in the end; so sure, if you need more heating, forget the two-bar fire, and buy a graphics controller instead - playing games with the two-bar fire isn't a good plan. I don't get why they can't make efficient GPUs. I mean, I do get that…

GPUs are efficient. That's why (some) people get benefits from throwing lots of power at them. If there were a smaller difference between a 200W part and a 300W part, fewer people would upgrade.

I do appreciate that!

It just seems seriously counter-intuitive to claim that spending 600W to put a moving colour picture on a screen the size of a bed-pillow counts as "efficient".

[Edit: obviously it doesn't take 600W to play back an HD movie - the energy is being spent on game computations, or hashing, or something like that]

Re: Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

#164

Post by marcosdumay »

eertami wrote: post #115
marcosdumay wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really won't run your rig at 500W all the time either. That's also peak power. Very few people have computers capable of cooling a constant 500W.

>You really won't run your rig at 500W all the time either. While this is true, I don't agree with your statement about cooling. It's very possible to have sustained 500W+ draw while playing a modern game on a 3080/3090. Sometimes you might play games for a few hours with a fairly consistent 500/600W power draw - honestly I think it's cheap and easy to cool this kind of load. A few 140mm fans and a mid-level CPU cool…

> A few 140mm fans

Yeah... Nearly nobody has a few 140mm fans on their computers. Most people won't have any fan lager than 120mm. Powerful computers usually have a pair of them. Maybe 3 if you count the PSU.

Re: Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

#165

Post by Arrath »

worrycue wrote: post #150
noobermin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this being downvoted? If you have a kilowatt (I wanted to type that out instead of write KW to emphasize it) coming out of the wall that energy has to go somewhere. Literally warm your room during winter and turn down your heater.

And make your AC work even harder during summer or if you live in a tropical/desert/…etc. climate.

I've idly been considering ducting my desktop's exhaust outside like a clothes dryer vent.

My previous computer didn't run very hot at all so the exhaust fan on the top blew onto the underside of my desk and then at me, it was actually uncomfortably cold in the winter. This new one is something else, though.

Re: Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

#166

Post by colejohnson66 »

stirfish wrote: post #161
nitrogen wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

excessive conspicuous consumption Energy is a proxy for accomplishment and development. Humanity's #1 goal should be to maximize energy use per capita while minimizing energy use per activity, such that every human is doing as many desirable activities as possible. Gaming at 1kW for an hour costs 30 cents or less in electricity. As others have mentioned indirectly, going for a Sunday drive to see the changing leaves…

>minimizing energy use per activity Maybe this is what feels off? A kilowatt feels like too much for a videogame. This isn't a bitcoin mining thing, is it?

If we take a game console or PC running at 250 watts (made up number), 4 hours is already a kilowatt-hour. Kilowatt-hours sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not.

Re: Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

#167

Post by vmception »

nitrogen wrote: post #143
vmception wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At which point does the GPU get its own dedicated power supply? This is true in many machines already for several years, if you look at the machines the hard to find GPUs are actually in. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is a market force behind this new PCIe standard.

Yeah, I was recently looking for an ATX motherboard extension cable to hack apart for an evening project, and all the results were for splitters to connect extra PSUs to the mobo's Power On signal for mining rigs.

Right, precisely. Its surprising how much people don't want to hear it.

Its like an acknowledgement of reality is seen as an endorsement of that reality.

Re: Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

#168

Post by MrFoof »

noobermin wrote: post #4

I'll be honest, it's very hard for me to imagine what I would do that would demand anywhere near 600 watts for a graphics card alone. I mean my PC can draw at most 120 watts and that feels like a lot, although the PC is pretty old by now. All of this for crypto? How many games are there out there that draw anywhere near this level of wattage just for graphics?

Just built a system that I managed to get a 3080Ti for at MSRP. I’ve spent a lot of effort to have it be silent (and extremely cool) with just air cooling, even when it does play games.

With a 5900X (slight overclock for max boost at 5.1GHz), some lightly overclocked 64GB of DDR4 memory, two 27” 1440p displays, a phone dock, KB, mouse, web cam and condenser mic it idles at about 150W.

General productivity, like development with a few VMs spun up, and maybe watching a 1080p video in the background? Maybe 180W.

Streaming a game. So I’m capping myself at 1080p60, which does not stress the 3080Ti with all settings maxed out. Two LED light rings also on, plus an LED pendant lamp. Now we’re squarely in 350-400W land for the entire setup.

Not streaming. 1440p, capping at 120fps (displays go to 170Hz). If settings are cranked up on a very recent title and I’m GPU bound, this is where the GPU alone can actually hit 400W by itself in some scenes (usually 280-350W) and the total power consumption for the room maxes at 600-650W.

—- ——-

There’s 6 140mm PWM case fans, the CPU has two 150mm PWM fans, and the GPU has three 92mm PWM fans. Case is all steel with sound deadening foam on both side panels. In every settings it’s silent unless I’m “going for broke” at max quality for averaging 120fps, where it’ll then be a “light whirr” once it’s heat soaked, which I’ve measured at 24.8dBA at 3 feet (~92 cm). GPU peaks at 76C, GPU memory peaks at 70C, CPU is around 65C, and system memory at 35C. All air cooled.

—- ————

Here’s the thing. Come next year, it’ll be a 32-core Threadripper with 256GB of memory and a NVMe RAID 10 array for real work with Spark without constantly paying by the hour. The CPU, storage, and system memory alone will probably pull 500W under max load factoring in the displays, KB and mouse. Still will idle close to 165W though.

Re: Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

#169

Post by myself248 »

xxpor wrote: post #152
myself248 wrote: post #125

That looks all the world like a Micro-Fit 3.0 drawing, whose contacts are normally rated at 8.5A, but here they're claiming 9.2A each. Also, the largest Micro-Fit terminal is made for 18AWG, but the article mentions 16. https://www.molex.com/molex/products/family/microfit_30?pare... I suspect what's happening is Molex is making a new version of the terminal with higher clamping force or better plating, to keep the te…

At what point would it make sense to move to a 24v or 48v power standard in PCs? The dc-dc conversion world has improved a lot since ATX was invented.

48v made sense years ago, the only reason we haven't done it is inertia. You're spot-on; the PSU is not making voltages that're directly used by components anymore, with the possible exception of 5v for USB and stuff. Everything else has a local DC-DC converter and the "12-ish" is used as an intermediate distribution standard.

Pursuant to that, the ATX12VO standard is a huge step in the right direction. It ditches the 5v and 3v3 rails from the PSU and uses 12 only. This requires only modest changes to peripherals, most of which were getting most of their power from the 12v rail already.

I think it's an excellent stepping stone on the way to an ATX48VO or something. That will require some more changes because a lot of popular power semiconductors are only rated to 30v or 35v or something, so there will be some push for a 24v compromise, but I think the efficiency gains with a higher voltage will ultimately win out.

Re: Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector

#170

Post by nomel »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #30
ksec wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This got me thinking. ( I must be missing something or having wrong assumption in my high overview of the issue. ) Do Crypto People use their GPU generated heat as heater assuming they lives in a place that requires heating anyway? Doesn't that equate to free money assuming they could actually mine crypto?

Heating with a Heat pump or Gas is significantly cheaper, so if you look at the big picture, it’s not “free money”.

Open air heat pumps have a lower limit for their operating temperature, so can't be used efficiently in cold climates (around Gas is somewhere around half the cost of electricity. Back in the day, you would still profit with a GPU.
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