Comment on 1U mini PC for AI?
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days agoThat’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.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
You can boost the 395 up to 120W, which might be where Framework is pushing it too, but those benchmarks are labelled 55W and that’s what AMD says is the default clock without adjustment. I’d love to see how the benchmarks compare at that higher boost but I’d imagine it’s diminishing returns similar to most GPUs. I think the benefit to using it in a lounge gaming PC would be the super low power draw, but you would need to figure out a display MUX switch and I don’t think that’s simple with desktop cards. Maybe something with a 5090 mobile would be the go at that point, but I have no idea how that compares to the 395 and whether it’s worth it.