sure most gaming pcs don't spit out plumes of
smoke while they're running but all that power that your thousand watt
power supply is sucking up has to come from somewhere and unless you're on
solar wind or hydro chances are it's fossil fuels so then
what's an environmentally conscious gamer to do
well thanks to csonic sponsoring this video we're going to be taking a step
back today from raw performance and seeing exactly how low we can take our
power consumption while keeping our games running great
before we can optimize for power efficiency we need to determine how much
performance we feel like we need for gaming
so basically to prevent ourselves from running quake 3 on a raspi and declaring
victory we're saying that our rig has to run a modern
aaa title at max ish settings 1080p
60fps so we're going to use shadow of the tomb raider as our bar
now strictly speaking most games don't need a six core CPU right now but we're
setting the bar there for two reasons one even if a game doesn't utilize every
core background processes still can and
having extra cores to throw those onto makes a big difference if you're already
at peak capacity and two we are
definitely going to be at peak capacity with the clocks we're going to be
running so then we've really only got a couple
of choices here representing AMD is either the ryzen 5 3600 or 3600x and
we're going to opt for the x version here in hopes that its higher silicon
quality will allow us to undervolt it to a greater degree saving us a little bit
of power then on the Intel side the obvious
equivalent is the core i5 9600 kf a
variant of the 9600k that has its GPU fused off and at least in theory
unpowered as the kf is a binned CPU compared to the lower end 9400 we should
be able to get more stable performance at lower voltages on average although
again it comes down to your luck in the silicon lottery you might think we'd go
for the equivalent t-series CPU but we couldn't find any we asked Intel about
this and they said subscribe to pewdiepie we informed them that that's a
completely dead meme at this point and we ended up getting a much better answer
second time around as it turns out there's nothing stopping retailers from
selling their low power t-series chips
but they're only available in oem tray packaging which means large minimum
order quantities and reduced warranty support so most apparently haven't
bothered now we'll want to grab motherboards with
as few extra bells and whistles as possible while still retaining decent
power delivery so the mid-range b series offering for both teams fits the bill
here and since ryzen relies so heavily on
memory speed for performance we're going to grab a 200 megahertz trident z memory
kit based on samsung b-dye chips
why such crazy fancy memory well we're
going to under-bolt the snot out of it just like our CPU in the interest of
saving a little bit of power so now we just take what we have drop the clocks
and voltages and see what happens i guess we should probably assemble it
first well yes we can't really drop the clocks and voltages unless we have yeah
right now there's zero one moment please it took a long time to dial in our
clocks but in the end we were left with both cpus running at 2.3 gigahertz with
voltages well under 1 volt our memory is running with timings as fast as we can
manage with as low a voltage as possible now as an aside our AMD system actually
managed a higher stable memory speed than our Intel system did then for good
measure we dropped our pci express link speed back to gen 2 for our GPU and gen
1 for everything else in order to reduce the energy required for those devices as
well any non-critical devices SATA controllers we aren't using wi-fi
adapters things like that were disabled and secondary voltages were tweaked
where possible okay so how are we doing here well my drink is still cold
lttstore.com but actually what i meant was the CPU testing oh in terms of raw
numbers our cpus are about even under synthetic load with AMD pulling a couple
of extra watts but Intel definitively idles lower
neither CPU idles as low as it could since i ended up needing to set a static
voltage for stability but overall it seemed like a worthwhile
trade-off right because we're gaming not using our pc as a glorified digital
picture frame so then AMD's more watts so we're going
Intel then right not quite see
our Intel bench here is having a little bit of trouble with frame pacing
even with vsync enabled to cap the frame rate
our AMD bench didn't do that and since they're both so similar in power draw at
these frequencies already bumping up the core i5's core clocks to fix that makes
it actually draw more power under load in spite of its instructions per clock
advantage over ryzen i even tried comparing to the standard 9600k and it's
the same story though the kf does add a lot lower if that matters at all
interesting so i guess that means we're going AMD then
also i couldn't help noticing that you are not using a fan on our cooler here
wow this thing is barely even warm yeah on our ryzen bench it actually
didn't even break 50 degrees on open air and i think that's probably thanks to
its bigger soldered ihs oh right actually that reminds me
we're doing a video about a really neat new cooler called a thermosyphon
so make sure you guys are subscribed uh if you want to see how far we can go
with that um anyway so we've got our CPU
figured out what about our graphics card surely we're not going to stick with a 2080 ti
here well i started with an rtx 2080 ti just to eliminate any bottlenecks while
i was testing the cpus and i've got it under vaulted as far as
it'll go but i suspect an rtx 2060 might
actually be better for this with its comparatively simple core layout or
maybe even rx 5700 well there's only one way for us to find
out for sure dialing in the GPU was both easier and
more difficult than you might at first expect yes the tools are easy enough to
use but there's no clean way to adjust the voltage for a
frequency just the other way around but using this to our advantage we
managed to trick our cards into capping out at a given frequency and from there
it was a matter of figuring out which voltage was both stable and most
efficient to use i guess team red still
has some work to do here power consumption was good but
performance and thermals definitely were not so
out goes the rx 5700 ouch
don't worry i'll keep you safe from the NVIDIA shell
put you over here oh speaking of which um
i see that you actually turned off the card's lighting and the fans are off
presumably that's to save some power but how did you stop the fans founders
editions don't have a zero RPM mode i'm glad you asked i flashed the BIOS that
was scripted by the way that was scripted by the way
flashed the BIOS on our card with an evga one so it could be sent to run at
zero RPM i set the software fan curve to cut in around the 80 degree mark and it
only really ramps up at around 85 which it never hits on our opener bench
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
versus 2060 versus 2080 ti no matter what i did i found that around
700 millivolts was the floor so with that in mind i think the results are
pretty clear given that the 2060 hits our 60fps target we can't justify the
bigger GPU unless we're willing to spend 40 watts of our power budget on rtx or
real-time ray tracing so
now we're ready to actually build this thing and see how it runs
do we even need to do that well we don't necessarily need to i just
figured it would be fun okay yeah let's do that while putting our build together
we didn't connect our case leds in order to save on that little bit of energy
that they require and we also decided to only connect the exhaust fan since
honestly we didn't need much if any additional airflow we chose our power
supply for a number of reasons and not just because seasonic is sponsoring this
video the biggest one is that as a titanium unit the efficiency of this
power supply never drops below 90 under any circumstances period that
means no matter how low we go we're only looking at 10 wastage at worst and at
best here on 115 volt mains in north america it reaches nearly 95 efficiency
just as importantly we need a power supply capable of a rock stable power
delivery for how low our voltages are any appreciable amount of ripple or poor
regulation even if it's in spec could cause momentary voltage droops that
could render our machine unstable or otherwise require us to bump the
voltages up to compensate similarly to how we chose a bend CPU and GPU we need
a high-end psu to make things reliable in the interests of efficiency at any
cost we could have shortened the psu cables as far as they'd go but the
energy savings is to put it gently quite difficult to
quantify so this is cool one side effect of having an extremely power efficient
pc is that you also end up with an
extremely quiet pc because the entire thing
is not consuming much energy so there's not a lot of waste heat to get rid of
so this is great we are right around 30 watts of idle sometimes it jumps up to
31 sometimes it dips down to 29 28 but
that is really freaking impressive to put that in perspective i mean compared
to the incandescent light bulbs that we used to use in our homes that is less
than a pretty dim 50 watt bulb while the computer is sitting not doing anything
but of course our real test here is
while gaming so let's fire up shadow of the tomb raider and see how we're doing
one thing you might notice despite the fact that this is a 4k monitor and it's
capable of 144 hertz we're currently running at 4k60
and it's also capable of HDR that's off
enabling high refresh rate or HDR increases our power drop by about five
watts each we don't have the monitor plugged into
the no but it increases the power draw on the GPU
i did not know that yeah i didn't either until i looked it up well i tried fresh
rate obviously because you're pumping out more frames but i didn't know that HDR had such a processing drop yeah me
neither fascinating yeah you wouldn't think so so to give our system the opportunity to
draw as much power as possible we've gone ahead and run it for about 10
minutes in game here to allow our GPU fans to ramp up so what we're gonna see
then is we've got a peak gaming power
draw of about 106 to 108
watts which again to put this in the context of the technology of yesteryear
when you bought a bright bulb for a large room it was typically like a 100
watt bulb so our entire gaming system here is
drawing about as much power as a light bulb from when i was a kid so that's a
fun fact but it doesn't give us any context for how this solution compares
to other gaming systems so we're going to go ahead and fire up an xbox one x
also playing shadow of the tomb raider at 60 FPS and see how that compares
so we can't guarantee our game is running at exactly the same graphical
fidelity here because we don't have the same fine control on a console but what
we can set is the frame rate and the resolution so we're running at 60fps
1080p high frame rate
just say 60fps so by comparison our modern console is
anywhere from 130 to 145 watts depending on what's on screen
now to be clear we're not exactly declaring
victory for the pc master race here that's
actually really impressive but that's of course one of the benefits of having
something that is fully integrated and there is a bit of a cost advantage on
the console side as well we're just wanting to provide you guys with the
context if you're willing to spend the money and spend the time you can get a
more efficient gaming experience on pc than you can even on a fully boxed in
custom designed game console so thanks for watching guys even if you don't care
about having the most efficient gaming pc hopefully you picked up a couple tips
and tricks here because aside from saving power tuning your pc and choosing
the right components the way that we did today can also help you save some heat
output during the summer which can be pretty freaking nice and some noise
because the more efficiently your system is running the less fan noise you have to deal with massive thanks to sea sonic
for sponsoring this video we've actually wanted to do it for quite some time and
if you guys are looking for another video to watch maybe watch the polar opposite of this one yeah yeah where we
overclock an 11 year old pc that's basically kind of like the muscle car
of uh of computing from back over a decade ago that was not power efficient
at all let that link below