I felt the same when the current-gen CPUs were announced, but when I looked closer at AMD’s chips, I learned that they come with controls for greatly reducing the power use with very little performance loss. Some people even report a performance gain from using these controls, because their custom power limits avoid thermal throttling.
It seems like the extreme heat and power draw shown in the marketing materials are more like competitive grandstanding than a requirement, and those same chips can instead be tuned for pretty good efficiency.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
This only got bad with the most recent generation of CPUs. AMD 5xxx series is very efficient as demonstrated by Gamers Nexus. The Intel CPUs from 2500k to idk, 8xxx series? were efficient until they started slapping more cores and then cranking the power on them.
Fermion@feddit.nl 1 year ago
The 7 series are more efficient than the 5 series. They just are programmed to go as fast as thermals allow. So the reviewers that had really powerful coolers on the cpus saw really high power draw. If instead you set a power cap, you get higher performance per watt than the previous generations.
Having the clocks scale to a thermal limit is a nice feature to have, but I don’t think it should have been the default mode.
candyman337@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yes the second thing about cranking power and cores is what I’m talking about.
Also, as far as gpus, the 2000 series was ridiculously power hungry at the time, and it looks downright reasonable now. It’s like the Overton window of power consumption lol.
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deranger@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I dunno, I ran a 2080 on the same PSU that I used on my 2500k/670 build, a 650W seasonic. Got some graphs? Power consumption didn’t seem to jump that bad until the latest gen.
candyman337@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
As for as the 2080 goes, like I said, it was big FOR THE TIME, and power hungry FOR THE TIME. It’s still reasonable especially for today’s standards
As for as the last two gens, 3000 and 4000 series, they are known to draw more than their rater power requirements, which, for their min recommended psu wattage, 3080 was 50 watts more than the 2080 (750w), and 4080 was 100 w more than that (850w)
To add to that, both of these gens of cards, when doing graphics intensive things like gaming, can overdraw power and have been known to cause hard shutdowns in pc’s PSUs that are even slightly higher rated than their power draw. Before these last two gens you could get away with a slightly lower than rated wattage PSU and sacrifice a little performance but that is definitely no longer the case.
And sure, the performance to watts used is better in the 3080, but they also run 10+ degrees hotter and the 4000 series even moreso.
I just hope the 5000 series goes the way of power consumption refinement rather than smashing more chips onto a board or vram fuckery like with the 4060