Comment by daneel_w
2 days ago
> 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.
Are the 10- and 40- series similar? Before the 1650 I had the 1060 in the same PC, and for a while I had an RTX 4060 in it as well (which I bailed on because the model emitted terrible coil noise). Neither really made any mentionable difference in idle power. I'm personally convinced that besides "NUCs" and running on only a 25-35W AMD APU with no discrete graphics card, the days of low-power stationary PCs are long over.
10 was probably the last truly inefficient, but you shouldn't be having problems with a 40.
Shame you don't have it around anymore, because I'd say set your desktop to like, native res, 60hz, only have one monitor installed, 8 bit SDR not 10 bit SDR, and see if the power usage goes away.
Like, on a 9800x3D /w 7900XTX with my 4th monitor unplugged (to get under the maximum super-idle load for the GPU), I'm sub-50W idle.
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