Nvidia, AMD gaming graphics buck green-PC trend
There is an ungreen revolution taking place in enthusiast game PC circles.
A 1,250-watt power supply--this one from Cooler Master--is the largest a game PC maker will install today.
(Credit: Cooler Master)The eye-opening graphics possible on today's game PCs come at a cost: light-dimming power consumption. The trend, rooted in the perennial quest for more speed, bucks the overall greening of the PC industry.
Green PC designs have become more than just practical; they're cool. Power-sipping Netbooks are in, as are small desktops like the Dell Studio Hybrid and Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Slimline.
This is not the case for high-end gaming PCs, where bigger is better. How far this trend can go isn't clear, but a seminal event in Apple's history may offer a lesson. In 2001, Apple unveiled one of the first dual-processor consumer systems, based on the overheating-prone IBM PowerPC G4 processor. The original Apple tower design had a Rube Goldberg feel to it, with a host of fans straining to rid the system of heat. A noise like that emitted by a wind tunnel, generated by the power supply and fans, forced Apple to redesign the system.
This symbolized why Apple eventually abandoned PowerPC: The platform wasn't efficient with power.
Fast-forward to 2008. Game rig makers are cramming as many as four graphics chips into high-end boxes that are notable not only for performance but also for the power they consume. As a consequence, big power supply units are in vogue. Today, bragging rights extend to the units themselves: some systems boasting boutique brand names such as Cooler Master and SilverStone draw 1,200 watts--roughly three times the power requirements of game systems a few years ago.
It's an ominous trend, according to box makers. "If this trend does continue, then, yes, it will give us problems," said George Yang, an engineer at Los Angeles-based game rig maker IBuyPower. "A regular home user would have to have an electrician come in, get the outlet out, and plug in a higher breaker," Yang said. Today, some of the higher-end systems with big power supplies require a special wall power socket, according to Yang.
Other game rig makers are equally concerned. "I swore that I'd never break 1,000 (watts)," said Kelt Reeves, president of game PC maker Falcon Northwest. "Unfortunately, that's been the solution for the past several years. Bigger, bigger, bigger power supplies."
Reeves says that 1,200 watts is now essential for gaming systems based on multiple boards from Nvidia or AMD's ATI graphics unit. "With three GTX 280s or two of the R700 cards, we're recommending they go with a 1,200-watt power supply," Reeves said, referring to the newest graphics chips from Nvidia and ATI respectively.
This is just about the limit, he said. "We can't go too much more over that before--if you actually pull that (power)--you start tripping the client's household circuit breaker."
Neither Nvidia nor ATI show any signs of slowing down, according to Reeves. "Eventually these chips get so hot that their own heat becomes a barrier to performance," he said.
Nvidia admits that its chips are drawing more power than before. "If we go back about three years, our graphics card power was in the 120- to 130-watt range," said Jason Paul, product manager in charge of enthusiast GPUs (graphics processing units) at Nvidia. "The GTX 280 which we launched a couple of months back, it's around 230 watts (of) graphics card power," he said.
But Paul claims the performance per watt is the key yardstick, not raw power. "Where you see a little under 2X increase in maximum power, you've seen probably 3-times or 4-times (the) increase in the level of performance. So, overall we see a substantial improvement in performance per watt. This is the big metric we track to ensure we're delivering efficient architectures. "
Paul says Nvidia has implemented power savings techniques on its GTX 280 that keep the power down when it's not running at top performance loads. "With the GTX 280 at idle, that card runs at about 25 watts, which is one-tenth of its absolute worst-case power," he said. Nvidia also offers hybrid graphics technology that turns off all the power-sucking boards when they're not in use.
Dell XPS 730 game box uses special liquid cooling to control heat.
(Credit: Dell Computer)Moreover, Paul says that the multiboard systems are limited to a small niche at the very top of the market. "There's definitely a segment of the market that wants more and more performance. Remember, however, that this is the ultimate performance (segment)."
But game box makers ship many--if not most--of their systems to the very niche that Paul is describing. "We're all about the high end. The higher-end the graphics card is, and the more expensive, the more we sell," said Reeves.
And the trend in power supplies exemplifies how this market has changed. "The power supply used to be just silver box, and nobody gave it a second thought," he said. "(But) as graphics cards have evolved, they have forced the power supply makers to keep providing more and more power pipes--or cabling--to the graphics cards"--increasing the unit's complexity, he said.
Reeves cites GPUs, not CPUs from Intel, as the culprit. "The latest CPUs use very little wattage. If you overclock a 3GHz Intel CPU to 4GHz, you might pull 40 more watts. Whereas a graphics card, you put three of them in a system, they'll pull 800 watts running some of the higher-end games," he said.
Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, an analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, among other endeavors, including co-manager of an after-school math-and-reading center. He writes for the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
A recommendation of a 1200 watt power supply does not mean, as the article says, that they "draw 1,200 watts." A power supply is generally recommended with some headroom. Add to this the fact that even as the picture at the top shows many power supplies are now "80 plus" certified, meaning that they are 80% efficient or better.
Also, the G4 was not what caused Apple to abandon the PowerPC platform. It actually ended up quite power efficient as evidenced by just how little power a G4 based Mac mini draws. The problem was the G5.
First off, by no means are 1KW PSU's required, nor are they mainstream for people that know what they're doing. When I first built my X6800 with a 680i, two Raptors, and an 8800GTX (with hopes of maybe SLIing in the future), I thought I'd need a 1KW Power Supply. Nothing was further from the truth. Because I had purchased a 1500W APC BackupUPS with a nifty front panel display showing me how much my draw was, I saw that I wasn't even tapping 400W when my system was just browsing web pages and maybe 450 when gaming.
Secondly, I have had the chance to upgrade to a GTX280 and was able to borrow another GTX280 from work. As far as nVidia not going green... nothing is further from the truth. The GTX280 will actually DOWNCLOCK itself when in 2D mode and draws about half the power. Most games run great with a second video card, but the cost really doesn't justify the change in frames/sec to me since after 32fps the human eye can't discern a difference. I was drawing less than 500W when running my system in SLI with a game running.
The trend in the Enthusiast market is not about the wattage anymore. It's whether the 12V rails on your system have enough amperage to run the graphics adapter. Given that cards require 32+A nowadays, that makes it seem like the system needs a 1500W PSU, but people need to keep in mind, that you're not drawing 1500W's while that PC is on. You're only drawing as much as the system needs.
So all in all, I guess the general jist of this story is ok, but definitely used extremes to justify the content and moral of the story and making nVidia and AMD look like the evil twins upsetting the climate and inducing Global Warming x2.
But really that would only happen if you've actually gotten it to pull a full 12 amps.
ATI also need something like that for their 4870 X2 because in idle it's drawing twice the power of single 4870, meaning that other core isn't really properly idling.
This is actually why I'm reluctant to perform video card upgrade now: nVidia is too expensive; ATI is too power consuming; but both consume way too much power even in idle.
It is unfortunate that AMD/ATI couldn't get the idle power lower on these cards, but the x2 isn't a problem compared to the rest of the line. The X2 uses less power at idle and at load than 2x 4870's and it also generally outperforms them.
I think you will find that many people, myself included, would disagree that "after 32fps the human eye can't discern a difference. "
Considering the fact that a 60 Hz flicker is often visible to me, I would say that I can see more than 32 Hz. You're right that it isn't really worth the cost, but I wouldn't be so quick to say that the difference is not visible.
Do you live in a constant state of danger? Ever been exposed to high doses of gamma rays and subsequently become more muscular and display a shift in hue towards more greenish skin tones when angered? Maybe you just need to switch to decaf ;-)
That's great if you are plugging your PC directly into your house's service feed, but the standard household circuit normally has a 15amp breaker. If you have a printer, monitor, and lamp plugged into the same circuit, you will be tripping the breaker.
I've tested it with a 'power-consumption' module that goes between the computer cord and the wall outlet..... 500Watts. at PEAK draw..... which it doesn't stay at for very long, even while heavily gaming or heavily video editing.
To be blunt..... these '2 or 3 card' solutions are NOT necessary, when a human eye cannot tell the difference between 60fps and 120fps.
I really think that gaming machines like the ones described in this article are just absurd. Nobody needs 2, 3, or 4 video cards in a single machine or a machine that has the potential to compete with your microwave or space heater for power draw. These machines can add $30 or more to an electric bill by themselves. And you can bet that these machines are still drawing obscene amounts of power even when just used for web surfing since there are so many more power-hungry components that are running, even if they are close to idle. And what's worse is that in a year's time a machine with a single card drawing far less power will be besting these monsters in performance.
I didn't even bother to finish the article as it started with such misinformation. If I want graphic card news, I'll go to Anandtech or Tom's.
- by fdunn3 September 5, 2008 8:18 AM PDT
- As was pointed out by previous posts, just because you have an 800-1KW Power supply does not mean you are constantly drawing anywhere near that much power on a "good" gaming system.
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(20 Comments)Now if you go with 4 GPUs then your average draw will be considerably higher but I am not one of the crowd that thinks more is better. Get a GPU with a wide memory bus an average (~700MHz) GPU clock combined with some DDR3 or DDR4 and I am happy.
Of course you'll also want multiple disks on RAID and a "Real" hardware raid solution but 650-750 would more than take care of that. The idea of having higher rated power supplies is rooted in transient power draw as in those times that your transient (milliseconds at most) can spike up higher and unless you have either the power supply that can handle it or some really high grade High capacitance output capacitors on that rail (another issue driving power up, the need for more 12V HI current rails) then you stand to Blue Screen, hang, or some other bad artifact.
Even throwing more memory at a fast processor bus (capacitive reactance * Frequency = Current) draws more current.
On the other end of the scale are the OEM Systems from the major manufacturers that put just enough power in the box that you really can't add anything to it without upgrading the Power supply and not all of them are running 80+ or 90+ efficiency supplies so their idle draw is higher.