Comment by formerly_proven
2 days ago
In terms of heat output the difference between an idling gaming PC from 10 years ago (~30-40 W) and one today (100+ W) is very noticeable in a room. Besides, even gaming PCs are likely idle or nearly idle a significant amount of time, and that's just power wasted. There are also commercial users of desktop GPUs, and there they are idle an even bigger percentage of the time.
I think the power efficiency of AMD graphics is improved by a lot in the past 10 years. If you compare Rx580 and Radeon 890m. They are 7 years apart, with almost the same performance, and 12X power usage difference (the new one is so low so it can be put into a mini pc and used as igpu). It's unimaginable if you said this 7 years ago.
Idling "gaming PCs" idle about 30-40w.
Your monitor configuration has always controlled idle power of a GPU (for about the past 15 years), and you need to be aware of what is "too much" for your GPU.
RDNA4 and Series 50 is anything more than the equivalent of a single 4k 120hz kicks it out of super-idle, and it sits at around ~75W.
> Idling "gaming PCs" idle about 30-40w.
Hm, do they? I don't think any stationary PC I've had the past 15 years have idled that low. They have all had modest(ish) specs, and the setups were tuned for balanced power consumption rather than performance. My current one idles at 50-55W. There's a Ryzen 5 5600G and an Nvidia GTX 1650 in there. The rest of the components are unassuming in terms of wattage: a single NVMe SSD, a single 120mm fan running at half RPM, and 16 GiB of RAM (of course without RGB LED nonsense).
Series 16 cards have weird idle problems. Mine also exhibited that. They're literally Series 20s with no RTX cores at all, and their identical 20 counterparts didn't seem to have the same issue.
So, I assume its Nvidia incompetence. Its my first and last Nvidia card in years, AMD treats users better.
4 replies →
Just checked my gaming PC - 5700xt + rx9060 and it's idling comfortably at 39W with a single 120hz 1080p display. Dual monitors will probably cause higher idling wattage.