Power Draw – Does it matter?
More and more reviews of hardware parts, especially CPU and GPUs are including how much power those parts use, and more people seem to, well, care. But does it really matter? What’s the real world cost of your high end hardware, compared to a more mid range system? Well, in this video we are going to find out – but first if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every monday, wednesday and friday.
So, here’s the idea. I’ll see how much power a high end Ryzen 3900X and RTX 2080ti system draws at idle, while gaming and while rendering a video, then I’ll switch over the parts to a Ryzen 3600X and a GTX 1660Ti and see how that compares. Right, lets go test then!
Starting with the idle power usage, it can vary slightly depending on what you are doing, but for the 3900X and 2080ti system it’s around 130W. Lets fire up a game and see how it does there – im gonna go with COD Modern Warfare as it’s a game I’ve been playing a whole lot recently, and because it’s a DX12, recent title. I’m gonna get it booted and jump into a custom game and I’ll get back to you.
Ok, we are in. I’m playing a gun game against mix difficulty bots for decent replicability in the tests, I’m playing at 4K to stress the GPU and because if you’ve got a 2080ti I should hope you are making use of it! Also basically max settings too. So, power draw wise we are looking at, oof, nearly 500W – around 480W right now. I mean, we are getting over 80FPS at 4K high settings, so that’s impressive. Right I’ma finish this round…
What about more productive work though, like rendering a video? Well, I’ve got my usual 10 minute test render here so lets drop it into Adobe Media Encoder with CUDA acceleration enabled and see how it does. Right, that’s rendering so lets take a look, seems to be somewhere around 240W which is about right really. Media encoder doesn’t really use the GPU all that well, so it’s mostly CPU and this one only draws around 140W total, and it draws like 20w at idle, so yeah I think that’s about right.
What about our mid range system then? Well, let me swap in the parts and we will have a look. Engage timelapse mode!
Right, CPU and GPU swapped! Let’s fire it up and see what our idle usage is. I’m gonna let it boot into Windows and settle as that initial startup can draw more power than normal thanks to all the programs that auto-start when you boot up. Ok it looks like we are idling somewhere around 100W, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. Let’s fire up COD again and see what that’s like. Remember, this system, even with the same high end motherboard, RAM, case and 240mm AIO costs not too far of HALF the price of the high end version – at around £1700 rather than nearly £3000.
COD is up, lets get in a game and see how much power this thing draws. Same settings, still at 4k to keep the test consistent and all that, same game type and still a different mouse… So, it’s looking like we are drawing around 235W here, and getting around 35FPS at 4K high settings, which honestly is impressive considering it’s a “lowly” 1660Ti.
Moving onto rendering, again it’s the same project with CUDA acceleration enabled, and this one is looking like 160W which again makes sense for this, since this one normally draws about 80W on full tilt, so 60W over idle is about right. So I’m gonna head upstairs, crunch the numbers then I’ll get back to you on how much this would cost you and all that.
Right, so after some googling, I found out that, on average, we all game about 7 hours a week. Those sound like rookie numbers to me, but hey, who can argue with data. And, at least here in the UK, the average price per KWh is 14.37p. So, 390 hours a year gaming, times 14.37p, times 480W for our high end system brings us to £26.90 a year in electricity. That’s not including monitors though, mind.
What about while you are working? Assuming you are rendering about the same amount of time each week – or even just using your PC for work, it would add up roughly, that’d cost you £13.45 a year. Not bad by comparison eh? And lets assume you use your PC for watching videos and stuff, basically idling it, again why not the same amount of time, that’d cost you £7.29 a year.
But what about our mid range PC? Well, that would cost you just £13.17 a year to game on – cheap by comparison! Work would be £8.97 a year, and idle would be £5.60. So, total cost for the high end system is just shy of £48 a year, versus our cheaper system at just shy of £28 or almost half the power usage.
So, does power usage matter? Well, not massively. If you can afford the near £3000 for the high end system in the first place, £50 a year probably isn’t all that damaging – and when you look at the percentage of its purchase price, for either, versus it’s running costs, it’s pretty negligible – 1.7% for the high end system.
There are other factors though, performance, obviously is a big deal as the cheaper system was very much out of its depth at 4k high settings, whereas the high end one was in its prime. Temps are also higher on the high end system, as is heat output so if you don’t want a space heater, maybe don’t go mad with the parts.
3600X on Amazon (Global): https://techteamgb.co.uk/3600x
3900X on Amazon (Global): https://techteamgb.co.uk/3900x
GTX 1660Ti on Amazon (Global): https://techteamgb.co.uk/gtx1660ti
RTX 2080Ti on Amazon (Global): https://techteamgb.co.uk/RTX2080ti
