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Looking for GPU recommendation and GPU idle power consumption

warning: I don't know a lot about graphics cards. If you know good resources on the power consumption of graphics cards or have measured it once yourself, I would be very interested.

Background:

I am planing a new PC build with one of AMDs new processors for my main work pc. As I understand, ryzen does not have integrated graphics at the moment, therefore I will need a gpu for the first time. I am now torn between  two options: Should I buy a "bare minimum" graphics card that is enough for desktop work and nothing else or something better that I can also use for blender rendering (a hobby of mine) and some light gaming? My main consideration is power consumption as I use my PC for heavy number crunching, sometimes days at a time (clarification: I don't use the GPU for my workload). So, if the GPU sits there and draws 50W while doing nothing I would not be very happy.

Some questions:

  1. Does switching of the monitors also power down the GPUs?
  2. Does the GPU draw power when it is disabled in the device manager or via command line?
  3. How much power does a typical GPU draw on typical Desktop use?
  4. Are there GPUs that have particularly low idle power?
  5. Does it make sense to use 2 GPUs, i.e. a low power GPU for desktop use and a better one for heavier tasks?

Thanks in advance for your answers. :)

 

edit: By the way. I am using two monitors and sometimes hook up a projector. I hope the questions above are not considered stupid, but this is way outside my field of expertise.

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1) No.

2) Yes.

3) My whole system (look in signature) draws about 70-90W at idle if I am not mistaken. Will check it later.

4) Integrated ones, but these do not have much power either.

5) Only in laptops, where power consumption is a real problem.

HAL9000: AMD Ryzen 9 3900x | Noctua NH-D15 chromax.black | 32 GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200 MHz | Asus X570 Prime Pro | ASUS TUF 3080 Ti | 1 TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus + 1 TB Crucial MX500 + 6 TB WD RED | Corsair HX1000 | be quiet Pure Base 500DX | LG 34UM95 34" 3440x1440

Hydrogen server: Intel i3-10100 | Cryorig M9i | 64 GB Crucial Ballistix 3200MHz DDR4 | Gigabyte B560M-DS3H | 33 TB of storage | Fractal Design Define R5 | unRAID 6.9.2

Carbon server: Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX100 S7p | Xeon E3-1230 v2 | 16 GB DDR3 ECC | 60 GB Corsair SSD & 250 GB Samsung 850 Pro | Intel i340-T4 | ESXi 6.5.1

Big Mac cluster: 2x Raspberry Pi 2 Model B | 1x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B | 2x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

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9 minutes ago, anotherriddle said:

Does it make sense to use 2 GPUs, i.e. a low power GPU for desktop use and a better one for heavier tasks?

no. in fact, i've did some testing on this earlier today, it's quite literally a waste of time and money.

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12 minutes ago, Thinkfreely said:

Lets define the choice, do you think you will game/created on the PC enough to justify a card? 

Up until now I used CPU rendering in Blender, which worked reasonable well for me, so no reason to change here. Currently I only play very old games on the integrated Intel graphics (i.e Age of Empires II) but maybe I would try something new too. The question is, when I Need a graphics card anyway, the sweet spot (for price to performance) is in the mid range of cards.

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5 minutes ago, jj9987 said:

1) No.

2) Yes.

thanks, this is kind of what I was expecting. It is kind of sad that you can't just turn of a GPU. Do you think there is a difference in power consumption with monitors switched of? What idle power are we talking for the GPU alone? 15W, 30W, 60W?

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27 minutes ago, manikyath said:

no. in fact, i've did some testing on this earlier today, it's quite literally a waste of time and money.

thanks :)

so, do you know what the idle power consumption of GPUs is? Is it around 10W, 30W, 50W or more like 70W+?

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