Discussion Worrying power trends in new PC components.

[DSzymborski]

True, but the model that I was referring to is.

PowerColor Devil 13 Dual Core R9 290X Specs

AMD Hawaii x2, 1000 MHz, 2816 Cores, 176 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 4096 MB GDDR5, 1350 MHz, 512 bit

www.techpowerup.com

Ah.

Totally forgot that one.

 

[hotaru.hino]

The trend toward CPUs and GPUs using more and more power is worrying, I mean the 14900k will use 250W+ if cooled well enough. not to mention some 4090 models can use 600W. I want to hear the community's opinions on this. If this continues, a 120V 15A outlet won't be enough. I am fully aware that you can undervolt and underclock and save power, but I am more referring to stock settings and/or overclocking.

I'd argue that manufacturers are only doing this because we're at a benchmark points arms race still and the moment someone does something silly, everyone else has to do this thing otherwise they'll, no matter how much you explain to the consumer, fall behind in some form or fashion.

An example of this is with the display industry. A while ago someone, probably some cheap display manufacturer, started marketing "dynamic contrast ratio." It didn't matter if this was a bogus value or could only be achieved in very specific, niche cases, now someone had a "1,000,000:1" value on their box and you didn't. So, you either play ball and slap your own 1,000,000:1 value or people will skip over you because the layman doesn't know any better and having a larger number is better.

I'm sure Intel likes it when review sites go "THE I9 IS THE FASTEST PROCESSOR EVAAAAAH!" even with the asterisk that it consume a stupid amount of power to do so.

And it doesn't help that a lot of PC gamers don't seem to care about power consumption. I got mocked a few times for trying to save say 50-100W because in the long run that was like maybe $20 a year (for them anyway, it would've been over ~$75-$80 for me).

It's one of those things where I blame everyone. But at the same time, the option to tame the components are there.

EDIT: One thing of note though is there's something called the Dennard Scale that related power consumption with transistor size and that broke down almost 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling. So the tl;dr is basically it's harder to make components more efficient, and it's only going to get worse.