Comment on 1U mini PC for AI?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 6 days agoEh, actually that’s not what I had in mind:
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Discrete desktop graphics idle hot. I think my 3090 uses at least 40W doing literally nothing.
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It’s always better to run big dies slower than small dies quicker. In other words, if you underclocked a big desktop GPU to 1/2 its peak clockspeed, it would use less than a fourth of the energy and run basically inaudible… so why keep a big iGPU around?
My use case was multitasking and compute stuff. EG game/use the discrete GPU while your IGP churns away running something. Or combine them in some workloads.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
That’s all valid for your usecase, but you were saying that you didn’t think many people would use it that way at all and that’s what I was saying I didn’t agree with. As well, a HTPC is kind of a different use case altogether to a lounge room gaming computer. There’s some overlap for sure, but if you want zero compromise gaming then you’re going to want all that CPU.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Eh, but you’d be way better off with an X3D CPU in that scenario, which is both faster in games, about as fast outside them (unless you’re dram bandwidth limited) and more power efficient (because they clock relatively low).
You right about the 395 being a fine HTPC machine by itself.
But I’m also saying even an older 7900, 4090 or whatever would be way lower power at the same performance as the 395’s IGP, and whisper quiet in comparison. It just doesn’t make sense to pair them without some weirdly specific use case that can use both at once.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but is the 395 not leagues ahead of something like a 4090 when it comes to performance per watt? Here’s a comparison graph of a 4090 against the Radeon 8060S, which is the 395’s iGPU:
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Now that’s apparently running at the 395’s default TDP of 55W so that includes the CPU power. It’s also clear that a 4090 can trounce it on sheer performance when needed. But if we take a look at this next graph:
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This shows that a 4090 has a third of the performance while still running at 130W, more than twice the TDP of the entire 395 APU.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Oh wow, that’s awesome! I didn’t know folks ran TDP tests like this, just that my old 3090 seems to have a minimum sweet spot around that same same ~200W based on my own testing, but I figured the 4000 or 5000 series might go lower. Apparently not, at least for the big die.
I also figured the 395 would draw more than 55W! That’s also awesome! I suspect newer, smaller GPUs like the 9000 or 5000 series still make the value proposition questionable, but still you make an excellent point.
And for reference, I just checked, and my dGPU hovers around 30W idle with no display connected.