Wednesday, June 1st 2022
PC Components with High Power Draw an Issue for an Overwhelming Majority of Users: Survey
In April, we polled our readers with the question "Are components with high power draw an issue for you?," and got back 22,040 responses. An overwhelming 85.5 percent of our readers (PC gamers and enthusiasts) take issue with high power draw for PC components. This comes in the wake of key components such as processors and discrete graphics cards rising in power-draw generation-over-generation, despite transitioning to smaller and smaller silicon fabrication nodes, signaling that Moore's Law isn't able to keep up with advances in performance and capabilities. The 85.5 percent of respondents who voted "yes," did so for very diverse reasons.
Our poll question wasn't a binary yes-or-no; and people could vote yes for different reasons—power bill, heat, noise, and the environment. 33.5 percent of respondents felt that power bill (energy costs) is the biggest reason why they chose yes. Heat is the second big factor, with 28.5 percent feeling that they don't want high power-draw component because power has a direct impact on heat, and all that heat is put out into the room despite how good the cooling solution is. The third place goes to noise at 12.2 percent, with bigger cooling requirements having an impact on system noise. Even big fat liquid cooling solutions ultimately rely on fans. Interestingly, only 11.3 percent voted that they care about the environment and hence take issue with high power-draw components. This figure, by the way, is much less than the 14.5 percent who voted that they don't care at all about components with high power draw.
Our question took shape as we followed the generation-over-generation power-draw trend of two key components—processors and graphics cards. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti, NVIDIA's fastest consumer graphics card in 2015, drew just 211 W of power under gaming workloads of the time, while the GTX 1080 Ti pulled a similar 231 W to workloads tested in 2017. The RTX 2080 Ti pulled 273 W for gaming of its time in 2018; while the current RTX 3090 Ti draws a whopping 445 W for today's games. These cards were each tested in different system setups, with different driver software and games which is why we can't put the data on a graph, but they still serve to illustrate a generationally rising power-draw. If Moore's Law held true, there should be a generational increase in performance from a new architecture at negligible increase in power, as the silicon will have transitioned to a new node with increased transistor density and improved power characteristics. This, however, isn't happening.
Our poll question wasn't a binary yes-or-no; and people could vote yes for different reasons—power bill, heat, noise, and the environment. 33.5 percent of respondents felt that power bill (energy costs) is the biggest reason why they chose yes. Heat is the second big factor, with 28.5 percent feeling that they don't want high power-draw component because power has a direct impact on heat, and all that heat is put out into the room despite how good the cooling solution is. The third place goes to noise at 12.2 percent, with bigger cooling requirements having an impact on system noise. Even big fat liquid cooling solutions ultimately rely on fans. Interestingly, only 11.3 percent voted that they care about the environment and hence take issue with high power-draw components. This figure, by the way, is much less than the 14.5 percent who voted that they don't care at all about components with high power draw.
150 Comments on PC Components with High Power Draw an Issue for an Overwhelming Majority of Users: Survey
Yep closely effected monthly reality overrules Captain Ahab projects.
I voted I do not care.
My 980 pro haven't seen over 50C yet, guess the heatsinks or doing their job well , also for the 970 evo.:D
I find it trully hypocritical to skip doing our parts because someone else is. Plus, Planetina's final solution was rather efficient. Just sayin'.
(not sorted by priority)
- initial buying cost, wich involves all systemcomponents, from case and fans, coolers, mainboard etc. (i will buy a good but not so capable 80+Gold PSU over a cheapo pseudo-strong PSU)
- compatibility to present system (strength of PSU)
- noise, so i will look for good, quiet components involving airflow etc.
all this takes me to efficient and cost-effective components
BUT i do not point my finger on a person:
- spending more money
- being more tolerant to higher noise
buying more capable and/or more inefficient components, that is upto each individual
... obviously until any law restricts minimum efficiency or maximum PSU power output for hobbyist or privatly used components, if ever
It's one thing to not be environmentally conscious, it's another to not be environmentally conscious, while pretending to be so.
Not interested in casting stones for former, but definitely will call out hypocrites doing the latter (I'd almost surely look like a hypocrite myself if I did complain about just the former).
When you're bumping heat by 50%, al just for a tiny 20% performance bump over stock, you realize how pointless this race has become!
And Id rather start with sub-200w stock video card than have to buy all the extra components to cool a 400w beast (single-loop water for video, (OR ELSE tons of added fans,) plus a lovely 1000w PSU to back it up! Some of us actually care about NOISE BEFORE EVERYTHING ELSE ( an its harder work to start with twice the load)!
In this time and age of social media shaming people and "cancelling" them has shown itself to be an effective method of making people reconsider their actions. As the matter of fact, it can absolutely scale up to shaming corporations via boycotting their products/services, if cancelling mob is large enough and profits tank sufficiently. Money talks, you know?
Get woke go broke.
As for boycotts: there has been one effective large-scale boycott in the history of the world. One. That was the one organized against the South African apartheid regime. Most of the time these things either have no effect whatsoever, or lead to an increase in lip service/greenwashing among the companies targeted. Actual, real, effective changes from boycotts and similar efforts is quite rare overall. Policy and legislation on the other hand, is effective, which is why corporations spend so much time and money lobbying and astroturfing to counteract or remove policies and laws they don't like.
Calling any individual out for being hypocritical is far more likely to lead to entrenched positions and outright hostility than anything else. Progress needs to be made by being smart first and foremost, and that means both directing attention and effort where it makes an impact, and not starting unnecessary fights. That just leads to polarization and stagnation.Depends who you mean by "people" I guess. People tend to care about both each other and the survival of humanity broadly (though there are obviously tons of exceptions). People in power, which typically also means people with vast personal wealth, very often either do not, or care more about entrenching and increasing their own wealth. And those are the ones who could have killed crypto, if anyone, after all. Your run-of-the-mill environmentally conscious person does not have any effective means of stopping an investment capital "bank" from financing a tech startup that promises to take their money, use it to burn energy, and create more "money" from that.
If there is truly an interest in limiting power consumption due to energy or environmental concerns there should not be financial disincentives, but an outright ban on high power draw computer components, unless the end-user can legally justify a need for them, which would be the case for datacenters, servers, and so on. This means that good servers or workstations with consumer-level hardware wouldn't be possible anymore, which hardware manufacturers may even welcome.
I'm not saying I'm looking forward to seeing this scenario, only that I expect lawmakers to be thinking about it, if the right persons will complain enough about the power draw of modern desktop systems.
Using the computer idle work uses very little electricity. There are many other appliances at you home that will have a much bigger impact on your electric bill than your gaming rig.
Just look at formula 1, same/better performance from smaller engines and more efficient use of technology. I mean you can get a 400bhp 2l 4 cylinder for focus now, where previously that power was reserved for v6/v8 territory.
Why can't there be a power limit imposed on GPUs so they focus on IPC (or whatever the PGU equivalent is) rather than shoving more power hungry cores into an ever increasing die size just because the node has shrunk.
I have a 5950x and a 3090, I didn't buy it blindly, I knew they were power hungry; but that doesn't mean I have no right to desire more power efficient cards in an increasingly expensive world, where the cost of energy and the impact on the environment is out of control.
A 400w+ GPU is simply out of touch with the direction of travel towards a more environmentally sustainable world; doesn't matter how many FPS it gives you.
Mr. Scott, we need more power!