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sure most gaming pcs don't spit out plumes of

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smoke while they're running but all that power that your thousand watt

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power supply is sucking up has to come from somewhere and unless you're on

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solar wind or hydro chances are it's fossil fuels so then

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what's an environmentally conscious gamer to do

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well thanks to csonic sponsoring this video we're going to be taking a step

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back today from raw performance and seeing exactly how low we can take our

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power consumption while keeping our games running great

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before we can optimize for power efficiency we need to determine how much

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performance we feel like we need for gaming

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so basically to prevent ourselves from running quake 3 on a raspi and declaring

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victory we're saying that our rig has to run a modern

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aaa title at max ish settings 1080p

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60fps so we're going to use shadow of the tomb raider as our bar

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now strictly speaking most games don't need a six core CPU right now but we're

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setting the bar there for two reasons one even if a game doesn't utilize every

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core background processes still can and

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having extra cores to throw those onto makes a big difference if you're already

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at peak capacity and two we are

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definitely going to be at peak capacity with the clocks we're going to be

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running so then we've really only got a couple

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of choices here representing AMD is either the ryzen 5 3600 or 3600x and

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we're going to opt for the x version here in hopes that its higher silicon

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quality will allow us to undervolt it to a greater degree saving us a little bit

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of power then on the Intel side the obvious

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equivalent is the core i5 9600 kf a

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variant of the 9600k that has its GPU fused off and at least in theory

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unpowered as the kf is a binned CPU compared to the lower end 9400 we should

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be able to get more stable performance at lower voltages on average although

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again it comes down to your luck in the silicon lottery you might think we'd go

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for the equivalent t-series CPU but we couldn't find any we asked Intel about

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this and they said subscribe to pewdiepie we informed them that that's a

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completely dead meme at this point and we ended up getting a much better answer

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second time around as it turns out there's nothing stopping retailers from

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selling their low power t-series chips

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but they're only available in oem tray packaging which means large minimum

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order quantities and reduced warranty support so most apparently haven't

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bothered now we'll want to grab motherboards with

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as few extra bells and whistles as possible while still retaining decent

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power delivery so the mid-range b series offering for both teams fits the bill

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here and since ryzen relies so heavily on

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memory speed for performance we're going to grab a 200 megahertz trident z memory

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kit based on samsung b-dye chips

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why such crazy fancy memory well we're

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going to under-bolt the snot out of it just like our CPU in the interest of

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saving a little bit of power so now we just take what we have drop the clocks

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and voltages and see what happens i guess we should probably assemble it

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first well yes we can't really drop the clocks and voltages unless we have yeah

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right now there's zero one moment please it took a long time to dial in our

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clocks but in the end we were left with both cpus running at 2.3 gigahertz with

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voltages well under 1 volt our memory is running with timings as fast as we can

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manage with as low a voltage as possible now as an aside our AMD system actually

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managed a higher stable memory speed than our Intel system did then for good

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measure we dropped our pci express link speed back to gen 2 for our GPU and gen

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1 for everything else in order to reduce the energy required for those devices as

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well any non-critical devices SATA controllers we aren't using wi-fi

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adapters things like that were disabled and secondary voltages were tweaked

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where possible okay so how are we doing here well my drink is still cold

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lttstore.com but actually what i meant was the CPU testing oh in terms of raw

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numbers our cpus are about even under synthetic load with AMD pulling a couple

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of extra watts but Intel definitively idles lower

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neither CPU idles as low as it could since i ended up needing to set a static

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voltage for stability but overall it seemed like a worthwhile

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trade-off right because we're gaming not using our pc as a glorified digital

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picture frame so then AMD's more watts so we're going

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Intel then right not quite see

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our Intel bench here is having a little bit of trouble with frame pacing

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even with vsync enabled to cap the frame rate

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our AMD bench didn't do that and since they're both so similar in power draw at

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these frequencies already bumping up the core i5's core clocks to fix that makes

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it actually draw more power under load in spite of its instructions per clock

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advantage over ryzen i even tried comparing to the standard 9600k and it's

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the same story though the kf does add a lot lower if that matters at all

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interesting so i guess that means we're going AMD then

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also i couldn't help noticing that you are not using a fan on our cooler here

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wow this thing is barely even warm yeah on our ryzen bench it actually

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didn't even break 50 degrees on open air and i think that's probably thanks to

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its bigger soldered ihs oh right actually that reminds me

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we're doing a video about a really neat new cooler called a thermosyphon

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so make sure you guys are subscribed uh if you want to see how far we can go

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with that um anyway so we've got our CPU

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figured out what about our graphics card surely we're not going to stick with a 2080 ti

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here well i started with an rtx 2080 ti just to eliminate any bottlenecks while

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i was testing the cpus and i've got it under vaulted as far as

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it'll go but i suspect an rtx 2060 might

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actually be better for this with its comparatively simple core layout or

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maybe even rx 5700 well there's only one way for us to find

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out for sure dialing in the GPU was both easier and

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more difficult than you might at first expect yes the tools are easy enough to

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use but there's no clean way to adjust the voltage for a

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frequency just the other way around but using this to our advantage we

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managed to trick our cards into capping out at a given frequency and from there

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it was a matter of figuring out which voltage was both stable and most

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efficient to use i guess team red still

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has some work to do here power consumption was good but

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performance and thermals definitely were not so

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out goes the rx 5700 ouch

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don't worry i'll keep you safe from the NVIDIA shell

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put you over here oh speaking of which um

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i see that you actually turned off the card's lighting and the fans are off

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presumably that's to save some power but how did you stop the fans founders

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editions don't have a zero RPM mode i'm glad you asked i flashed the BIOS that

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was scripted by the way that was scripted by the way

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flashed the BIOS on our card with an evga one so it could be sent to run at

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zero RPM i set the software fan curve to cut in around the 80 degree mark and it

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only really ramps up at around 85 which it never hits on our opener bench

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we're going to have a link by the way to how you can do that in the video description yeah and as for the rtx 2080

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versus 2060 versus 2080 ti no matter what i did i found that around

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700 millivolts was the floor so with that in mind i think the results are

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pretty clear given that the 2060 hits our 60fps target we can't justify the

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bigger GPU unless we're willing to spend 40 watts of our power budget on rtx or

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real-time ray tracing so

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now we're ready to actually build this thing and see how it runs

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do we even need to do that well we don't necessarily need to i just

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figured it would be fun okay yeah let's do that while putting our build together

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we didn't connect our case leds in order to save on that little bit of energy

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that they require and we also decided to only connect the exhaust fan since

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honestly we didn't need much if any additional airflow we chose our power

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supply for a number of reasons and not just because seasonic is sponsoring this

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video the biggest one is that as a titanium unit the efficiency of this

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power supply never drops below 90 under any circumstances period that

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means no matter how low we go we're only looking at 10 wastage at worst and at

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best here on 115 volt mains in north america it reaches nearly 95 efficiency

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just as importantly we need a power supply capable of a rock stable power

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delivery for how low our voltages are any appreciable amount of ripple or poor

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regulation even if it's in spec could cause momentary voltage droops that

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could render our machine unstable or otherwise require us to bump the

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voltages up to compensate similarly to how we chose a bend CPU and GPU we need

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a high-end psu to make things reliable in the interests of efficiency at any

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cost we could have shortened the psu cables as far as they'd go but the

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energy savings is to put it gently quite difficult to

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quantify so this is cool one side effect of having an extremely power efficient

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pc is that you also end up with an

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extremely quiet pc because the entire thing

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is not consuming much energy so there's not a lot of waste heat to get rid of

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so this is great we are right around 30 watts of idle sometimes it jumps up to

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31 sometimes it dips down to 29 28 but

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that is really freaking impressive to put that in perspective i mean compared

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to the incandescent light bulbs that we used to use in our homes that is less

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than a pretty dim 50 watt bulb while the computer is sitting not doing anything

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but of course our real test here is

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while gaming so let's fire up shadow of the tomb raider and see how we're doing

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one thing you might notice despite the fact that this is a 4k monitor and it's

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capable of 144 hertz we're currently running at 4k60

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and it's also capable of HDR that's off

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enabling high refresh rate or HDR increases our power drop by about five

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watts each we don't have the monitor plugged into

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the no but it increases the power draw on the GPU

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i did not know that yeah i didn't either until i looked it up well i tried fresh

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rate obviously because you're pumping out more frames but i didn't know that HDR had such a processing drop yeah me

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neither fascinating yeah you wouldn't think so so to give our system the opportunity to

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draw as much power as possible we've gone ahead and run it for about 10

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minutes in game here to allow our GPU fans to ramp up so what we're gonna see

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then is we've got a peak gaming power

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draw of about 106 to 108

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watts which again to put this in the context of the technology of yesteryear

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when you bought a bright bulb for a large room it was typically like a 100

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watt bulb so our entire gaming system here is

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drawing about as much power as a light bulb from when i was a kid so that's a

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fun fact but it doesn't give us any context for how this solution compares

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to other gaming systems so we're going to go ahead and fire up an xbox one x

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also playing shadow of the tomb raider at 60 FPS and see how that compares

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so we can't guarantee our game is running at exactly the same graphical

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fidelity here because we don't have the same fine control on a console but what

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we can set is the frame rate and the resolution so we're running at 60fps

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1080p high frame rate

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just say 60fps so by comparison our modern console is

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anywhere from 130 to 145 watts depending on what's on screen

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now to be clear we're not exactly declaring

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victory for the pc master race here that's

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actually really impressive but that's of course one of the benefits of having

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something that is fully integrated and there is a bit of a cost advantage on

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the console side as well we're just wanting to provide you guys with the

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context if you're willing to spend the money and spend the time you can get a

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more efficient gaming experience on pc than you can even on a fully boxed in

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custom designed game console so thanks for watching guys even if you don't care

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about having the most efficient gaming pc hopefully you picked up a couple tips

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and tricks here because aside from saving power tuning your pc and choosing

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the right components the way that we did today can also help you save some heat

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output during the summer which can be pretty freaking nice and some noise

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because the more efficiently your system is running the less fan noise you have to deal with massive thanks to sea sonic

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for sponsoring this video we've actually wanted to do it for quite some time and

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if you guys are looking for another video to watch maybe watch the polar opposite of this one yeah yeah where we

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overclock an 11 year old pc that's basically kind of like the muscle car

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of uh of computing from back over a decade ago that was not power efficient

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at all let that link below