a thousand Watts that is the recommended
power budget for this GeForce RTX 4090
from MSI in this economy no wonder gamers are outraged what if I told you
there's another way what if I told you I'm gonna ditch my thousand watt power
supply and run this top spec gaming rig
complete with RTX 4090 on just a
550 watt power supply there will be
trials oh crap there will be tribulations ah crap
but I will be darned I say if I'm gonna have you guys
paying full price to run your rig after you gone wisely
blew your savings on a video game machine smart deploy powered by pdq.com
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free licenses worth over 500 at smartdeploy.com Linus so first things
first do you even need a thousand watt
power supply or is this whole thing overblown to find out we've dusted off
our NVIDIA PCAT an inline power
measurement device designed for gpus and we've yanked together a PCIe y power
splitter to accommodate the four bloody
eight pin PCI Express connections that you need for the 12 pin adapter for this
GPU you see the PCAT was designed in the
before four times when nobody ever thought you'd need more than three eight
pin power connectors for a single graphics card I wouldn't describe this
as our most stable GPU ever but I don't think it's going anywhere there are a
couple of ways that we're going to monitor our power consumption first of all we've got the PCAT that I just
mentioned before tells us the GPU's power draw then we're going to have a
regular wall power meter which is going to tell us the total power draw of the
system including any losses due to the inefficiency of our power supply we'll
kick things off with a real game in this case cyberpunk 2077 running at 4K mostly
High presets with Ray tracing set to medium and our GPU is sucking back a
whopping 430 to 470 Watts with our total
system power consumption at about 600
watts all while running at a cool 50 FPS
boy is this ever a demanding game almost
as demanding as MSI's combust or stress
testing application wow it's a little lower even I guess any additional load
that combustor puts on the traditional restaurant rendering course is more than
made up for by the activation of the ray tracing cores in cyberpunk we're going
to need Ray traced freaking stress tests
what the heck whatever the reason it's pretty clear that we don't need a
thousand watt power supply to run this card which makes sense I guess given
that NVIDIA themselves only recommends an 850 watt unit for their Founders
Edition version of the 4090 which raises the question why is MSI asking you to
spend extra money on a thousand watt power supply if I had to guess I'd say
it's for two reasons first to accommodate for any extra power drop
from overclocking and second to account for our connected peripherals like bus
powered USB devices hard drives LED strips the last thing they want is for
you to plug a bunch of other stuff in and then come crying to them when your
system shuts down which raises the question how much more power could we
draw in their OC load as advertised
system power consumption is up in the neighborhood of around 10 percent but
unfortunately it didn't have the impact on FPS that I might have expected we've
gone from about 50 FPS to anywhere from 50 to 54. which kind of raises the
question has NVIDIA already got the 4090
absolutely redlined and if that is the case could we maintain nearly the same
performance but drop our voltage for a big bump in efficiency the first step in
our journey is to drop back down to default mode shut down the system and
try again with MSI's minimum recommended power supply and 850 watt Tech tip for
you guys you should never do what I'm doing where you swap out a power supply
and use the same modular cables and the
reason that you shouldn't do that is because they might not actually use the
same pin outs and you can accidentally fry the devices on the other end in our
case we have a painstakingly validated that these use exactly the same pin out
but we still don't recommend it do as I say not as I do
ah no no just kidding it's fine even within the same manufacturer they're not
always the same pinout as expected our performance is identical
with our 850 watt power supply as is our system power consumption at around 630
Watts from the wall meaning that it is probably safe to run pretty much any 40
90 on a good quality 850 watt power supply and that thousand watt
recommendation seems to be more about butt covering than any actual concern
for over current protection kicking in and shutting off your computer but if
850 watts is fine then perhaps
750 watts is also fine I mean it still
only says 600 watts from the wall right and that's accounting for the power
supply is inefficiencies something like 550. I think we're going to get there if
these Donuts in the middle of the intersection or anything to go by 750
watts is fine just fine with a 100 plus
watt buffer but that's not to say that
every 750 watt power supply is going to
handle a ryzen 7000 and a 40 90. there
are a couple of major factors to consider first is transient spikes we
first noticed this with the RTX 3000 Series but Power hungry gpus like this
one can momentarily draw far more power
than what they are rated for it's not for long enough to cause thermal
problems like usually only for a few microseconds but it can be enough to
trigger the over current protection of your power supply especially if you're
running an older unit that wasn't designed for modern Beast gpus another
Factor we're not considering here is capacitor aging this power supply
probably only has a dozen or so hours on it at most give it another hundred
thousand hours and depending on factors like how hot or cool it was running it
could be operating at maybe 95 percent of its brand new capacity or 90 or even
much lower by choosing a properly spec
unit with plenty of Headroom you give yourself a better chance of years of
trouble-free operation and help avoid blade catastrophic failure because the
thing about power supplies is when they pop they can sometimes take everything
else with them which won't stop us from
seeing how low we can go where's my 650
watt power supply I know where it is I'll get it now we
are running into a situation where we've actually run out of eight pin power
connectors coming out of our power supply so we're going to have to employ
a splitter all the Y splitters you know
why Splitters like sorry see Sonic you
guys were a great sponsor I apologize in advance for blowing up your power supply
on camera hopefully we can work together again in the future it's probably fine
what will probably happen is we will trigger the over current protection of
our power supply and the system will just shut off we do need to drive around a
bit before we say for certain this is working it puts a little bit more load
on the GPU I saw it at 6 20 there basically we could put a couple LED
strips on this system and it could put us over the limit for those of you
wondering by the way we stopped using combustor because the load wasn't even as high as cyberpunk I thought it would
be higher oh one thing we could do is we
could put a little bit of CPU load on the system cyberpunk is still running in
the background and what will probably happen is the game I will die in the background
and it won't actually be rendering 567.
740 oh get this Brandon how is it doing that that doesn't seem right see Sonic
hello our FPS is n a we've left this
plane of existence behind GeForce experience this probably just bugs that
happens sometimes but I was um I was not expecting this I guess it
could be that their 650 watt unit is simply over specked and they set their
over current protection for something far in excess of 650 Watts the fan isn't
even spinning see Sonic what you doing I
mean that is the way to build a really high quality 650 watt power supply is if
it's just a 750 watt power supply in you
know with the seven scratched out and just put a six there
to be clear I'm not expecting anything to happen at the desktop we're sitting at like 130 Watts right now but I am
expecting something to happen because aside from going down from 650 to 550
Watts we're also stepping down from csonic's Prime titanium premium power
supply lineup to their focus lineup which is that means 80 plus gold it
still see Sonic 10-year warranty blah blah blah but it's very unlikely that
that's you know an 800 watt power supply and 550 watt clothing holy
ah this is not what I expected we are
drawing 630 Watts from the wall the GPU is at
450 Watts you know we shot the intro for this video with the trials and the
tribulation I was expecting there to be crashes for us to cut in there
I'm gonna have to oh oh crap well there's one ah but it's okay
we have a way around it first up in our bag of tricks instead of turning our
power Target up we are going to turn it down maybe 90 is enough to get by with
550 Watts about 2 800 megahertz is what
we get on this one in default so as long as we're close to that we are in good
shape we'll also be able to tell from the FPS the game is running at though
ah crap well we're gonna need more than uh 10
power limit how about 80
600 watts from the wall already okay come on come on come on
come on ah crap come on
we're not defeated yet though we found we can go as low as about 70 power limit
without losing a ton of performance we make it 70 percent
ply overall system power consumption is
under 550 watts of the wall crap
crap we couldn't even get the close-up but we aren't defeated yet we could drop
the GPU down to 60. 50 power limit the
issue is that when we do that we risk seeing some pretty funky Behavior even
if our FPS still looks okay we might need to start attacking this from a CPU
perspective oh crap oh this is not good
actually before we adjust our CPU one
thing we can try is remember how I'm running a y Splitter from one of my
power supply outputs to two of the inputs on our NVIDIA power measurement
board well there's a way that we could not do that we have four total outputs
on this power supply and what we could do is we could just run a single eight
pin to the CPU and then three dedicated
eight pins over to this board I'm going
to step it back to 80 power limit I believe we were overloading a 12 volt
rail not actually overloading the power
supply oh God it's already
okay
darn it Brandon you've captured plenty of the crashes so
far you don't need to have all of my failures on film oh crap oh crap ah crap
I'm just gonna power straight into it 70 power limit let's go yeah it's still
jumping up as high as like 360 Watts that doesn't seem like 70 percent of the
power limit
we're not done yet my hope is that we can save a bit of our overall system
power budget by reducing the voltage to our CPU we're leaving everything else on
normal we've even got PBO Precision boost overdrive still enabled which
allows the CPU to Turbo up higher and for longer but maybe by reducing the
voltage just just 0.15 volts
get away with something here we might have gone a little aggressive on that
CPU underbolt but we also really want to see this work so
go in game in game
we managed to drop our overall system power consumption by like 20 and all it
cost us was we're running at 49 FPS right now 48
less than 10 percent of our actual real
world performance we are running a 7900x
and a 4090 on a 550 watt power supply as
promised even though I didn't know for sure what
happened of course as cool as that was nobody's gonna buy a GPU like this only
to leave performance on the table thankfully you can have the best of both
worlds we observed that our GPU clock was around 2.8 gigahertz under sustained
load so what we can do is go into the curve editor in MSI afterburner hold alt
and take our very farthest dot here and
drag our frequency Target down to about 2.8 then we're going to individually
drag up our 950 millivolt dot to
2.8 gigahertz and a plus
changed our Target from 3 gigahertz to 2.8 which is fine
because we were only hitting 2.8 gigahertz anyway theoretically assuming
we stay stable we should have our lower power consumption and our stock
performance almost we'll get to that in a moment the key night among you will
have noticed we're back to our 650 rather than our 550 watt power supply we
saw some very strange Behavior with the 550. so for this demo I just want to
show you how the power consumption is low I don't need to be using a 550 watt
power supply the game Crash let's try
970 millivolts and there we have it even
though we backed off our CPU under volt a little bit we're down to minus 0.1
volt and we're at 975 millivolts on our
GPU we are still 100 Watts lower than we were when we
started as for our performance
lower but we can fix that very easily all we got to do is alt Tab out then
we're just going to play with our memory clock let's try plus 500. it's possible
we could go higher than that but 500 is pretty safe now we're back in
game and I'm seeing as high as 60 FPS but going back to the same area now it's
more like yeah dropped under 50. ah
let's give the memory a little more juice let's say 900.
40 Watts 52 54.
60 say we are pretty darn near we started
now not bad for a 650 watt power supply all of this raises the question what if
instead of going full balls out NVIDIA
did what we did we could have had smaller coolers more sensible power
supply requirements nearly the same performance like in real terms that
could be hundreds of dollars in savings over the years that you might be
expected to run a GPU like this but then it's also possible that nothing would
have been different maybe in order to get economical yields on Ada Lovelace
RTX 4000 architecture code name they needed to accept these power hungry
parts and maybe we just got a good one
the good news though is that even if that's the case at sixteen hundred
dollars this is a problem that won't affect a lot of people and those that
can't afford this GPU can probably afford the running cost either way it
was an interesting Adventure just like this interesting Adventure into Segway
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