Logic / theory for new build high-end PC which produces the LEAST amount of heat radiation?

[Actual_Criminal]

Budget (including currency): £3,500

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Various

 

This post is just a hypothetical post to work out whether reducing heat radiation can be achieved in a manner which is worthwhile... It is not really about the specific parts just yet, more so the theory of the build to see if it is worth doing.

 

In a nutshell, my brother's old PC broke and he is in the market for a brand new 2023 / 2024 gaming desktop for his room. Very high budget for top-end parts... The problem is, the last PC he had used to heat up his office room drastically. The room is very small and can only just about fit in a desk, chair and a side-table; this caused the room to get very very hot when the PC was at load, even with the small window open. Here in the UK, air-conditioning isn't that common and is not installed in the house. Standing units are available, but it would consume loads of electric if it was on for 8+ hours a day. 

 

So, I am trying to work out if I can somehow design a PC with this in mind that is the highest performance possible, but with heat radiation as the priority over performance if it drastically reduces temperatures of waste heat. 

 

Graphics Card

I am no scientist, but I assume the more watts that each parts draws, equals more heat radiation. So an RTX 4090 that draws 450W would give off way more heat radiation than a RTX 4070 that only draws 200W, even if the actual GPU temperatures are around the same? Based on this logic, it would be best to use the GPU which gives the best Power : Performance ratio? (Usually it's the XX70 card).

 

CPU & CPU Cooler

I am assume the same logic would apply to the above as well? 

 

As for the cooler, I don't think it would make a difference between air and AIO, as let's say you had an air cooler that cooled off a GPU to 65°C, but the AIO could cool it to 55°C... it would make a difference to performance but the actual heat radiation given off into the surrounding room would be the same right?

 

Memory

I suspect these give off very little heat radiation as usually only a few watts. Still, every small aspect matters in this scenario as it contributes to the bigger picture. I am guessing fewer dimms is the best option?

 

Storage Devices

Now I am not too sure about this one. I know the NVMe SSD's can get quite hot, as my own ones even have heatsinks attached. It would be great if anyone can expand more on this. I wouldn't be really leaning towards using HDD's unless they are for normal extra storage. For the main OS drive, I assume a Sata SSD would be the best?

 

PSU

Correct me if I am wrong, but the whole rating category of PSU's is literally based on how efficient it is. The higher the rating, the less 'waste'. As my goal is less waste, I assume a Titanium rated PSU at around 110% of the total PC's estimated power draw should be the best? Also interested to hear whether there is any specific PSU's that would be good for this as I know some have cooling factors.

 

Motherboard

I understand you can get MOBO's these days with water block functions. This might be an option.

 

Case & Fans

This is probably the most important part. My logic is that I should find the biggest case possible, as that way it creates the biggest internal atmosphere inside the PC; this is in addition to running ALL of the fans on the PC to an intake orientation with no exhaust. I am also wondering if it could be a good idea to almost seal the entire desktop using tape for any openings. Of course, it would get very hot inside as there would be no exhaust fans at all, but I am not sure if that would even work.

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Open to ideas, so feel free to suggest anything that you think could work.

[chtorogu]

You seem to have it mostly right. Though a major reason to use cooler parts is to be able to use compact cases. And having all intake and no exhaust is a big no no. Then you'll trap the heat and cook your components. It would boot up then gradually heat up until it severely throttles then turns off due to overheating. Having a bit more intake than exhaust is good though, as it helps keep dust out of your case.

 

If you want to minimize heat exhaust you need to choose the lowest wattage components possible for the intended use. I'd put together a small system, micro atx or even mini-itx, with a Ryzen 3 processor and a GPU that can be powered without PCI-e power plug. It'll be low wattage no more than about 200W in total. If you're OK with integrated graphics you can bring that down a further 75W. 200W is hardly enough to heat up a room.

 

High end and low wattage/heat is simply not possible. But you can put together a low power/cool system that can play most anything at decent settings and resolution.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

1 hour ago, Actual_Criminal said:

In a nutshell, my brother's old PC broke and he is in the market for a brand new 2023 / 2024 gaming desktop for his room. Very high budget for top-end parts... The problem is, the last PC he had used to heat up his office room drastically. The room is very small and can only just about fit in a desk, chair and a side-table; this caused the room to get very very hot when the PC was at load, even with the small window open. Here in the UK, air-conditioning isn't that common and is not installed in the house. Standing units are available, but it would consume loads of electric if it was on for 8+ hours a day. 

Build a normal pc but duct the exhaust and redirect it to go directly outside of the room, basically you duct the exhaust to that small window so all the waste heat immedeatly gets expelled outside of the room hence no more room heating shenanigans

 

I think ltt has made a vid of this awhile back

[KaitouX]

29 minutes ago, chtorogu said:

If you want to minimize heat exhaust you need to choose the lowest wattage components possible for the intended use. I'd put together a small system, micro atx or even mini-itx, with a Ryzen 3 processor and a GPU that can be powered without PCI-e power plug. It'll be low wattage no more than about 200W in total. If you're OK with integrated graphics you can bring that down a further 75W. 200W is hardly enough to heat up a room.

 

High end and low wattage/heat is simply not possible. But you can put together a low power/cool system that can play most anything at decent settings and resolution.

If you're willing to tweak some settings it's possible. You would be sacrificing performance, that's obvious, but not as much as many people expect. For example, running a 13900K/14900K at 125W, you would be losing roughly 20% performance compared to stock in heavy all-core workloads, and a 7950X at 88W also loses roughly the same. The 4090 can be limited to about 230W while keeping about 80% of stock performance, I think the 4080 and 4070Ti might be better suited for lower power targets though as in GPUs there are other parts of the board you can't really tweak. For the most part you can assume that in most current high-end parts you can cut the power consumption in half while losing 25% or less performance on average.

[chtorogu]

13 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Build a normal pc but duct the exhaust and redirect it to go directly outside of the room, basically you duct the exhaust to that small window so all the waste heat immedeatly gets expelled outside of the room hence no more room heating shenanigans

 

I think ltt has made a vid of this awhile back

Would also be an option. Taping tubing to the exhaust perhaps and putting the other end out the window. Though you don't need anywhere near high end to get a good modern gaming and computing experience. Especially not with freesync and dlss/fsr.

[chtorogu]

3 minutes ago, KaitouX said:

If you're willing to tweak some settings it's possible. You would be sacrificing performance, that's obvious, but not as much as many people expect. For example, running a 13900K/14900K at 125W, you would be losing roughly 20% performance compared to stock in heavy all-core workloads, and a 7950X at 88W also loses roughly the same. The 4090 can be limited to about 230W while keeping about 80% of stock performance, I think the 4080 and 4070Ti might be better suited for lower power targets though as in GPUs there are other parts of the board you can't really tweak. For the most part you can assume that in most current high-end parts you can cut the power consumption in half while losing 25% or less performance on average.

Yes, but you may as well get lower end parts then rather that gimping and partially wasting higher end ones.

[KaitouX]

1 hour ago, chtorogu said:

Yes, but you may as well get lower end parts then rather that gimping and partially wasting higher end ones.

A 13900K@125W is faster than a 13700K@253W, the 7950X@88W is faster than the 7900X@230W, when you limit both to the same power the 13900K is ~20% faster than the 13700K(@125W) and the 7950X is 18% faster than the 7900X(@88W), which while a smaller difference than when both are stock, still is a decent difference and it also gives you flexibility to decide how you set up the CPU, if you're okay with a slightly higher power consumption, you could set the 13900K to 190W and lose something like 5~8% compared to stock, or set PL1 and PL2 in a way where short tasks get the entire 253W limit and longer ones get limited to 150W.

The 4090@~230W is also slightly faster than the 4080@Stock, it also comes with more VRAM, which is helpful, or even necessary for some applications.

There's also undervolting, but that is a lot more dependent on silicon luck.

[porina]

Temperatures are mostly irrelevant. For this exercise, power used = heating.

 

The rest is more flexible depending on the desired performance target.

 

PSU: Getting an efficient PSU is a great start. If you really want to optimise it, you can estimate the load power consumption of the system and look for the highest efficiency PSU at that operating point. Depending on how much time the system will be under load vs near idle, you may also want to try considering idle power usage, although it is probably insignificant when it comes to room heating.

 

Ram: DDR5 should be more efficient than DDR4, but for a modern system that wont be a problem. Just get enough for the use case, likely 32GB as a good balance point. Don't go for crazy speeds.

 

SSDs: I wouldn't worry about optimising this. Just get what's needed in capacity and performance. They get hottest thus using most power under heavy sustained write conditions which generally isn't that often.

 

CPU: 7800X3D is reported to be high performing and low power usage in gaming. If 8 cores are enough that would probably be the sweet spot for gaming. I'm unsure if this carries over to productivity, especially if we move to higher core counts. If Intel, then use of a power limit may be required to constrain the peaks somewhat.

 

GPU: Getting the highest model you can, and setting a lower power limit would give best perf/power ratio. Why don't they do this as standard? Cost. For current gen probably nvidia is the optimal choice.

 

Mobo/case: doesn't matter. 

 

Don't neglect other components too. Monitors in particular can vary a lot in power usage. My early gen LCD with CF backlight puts out more heat than more modern ones with LED backlight for example.

[KaitouX]

11 minutes ago, porina said:

GPU: Getting the highest model you can, and setting a lower power limit would give best perf/power ratio. Why don't they do this as standard? Cost. For current gen probably nvidia is the optimal choice.

Depending on how low you want to go with the power limit, this might not be correct. In my experience with power limiting GPUs, if you drop the power more than half it starts do drop the performance really hard, and this seems to be true for the 4090 as well, @150W it seems to be actually slower than the 4070@200W in benchmarks, i would guess this is due to the rest of the board using a lot more power on the 4090 then a 4070.

For CPUs, as long as you keep the power at 65W or above it's fine for both Intel and AMD, the flagships are the fastest, but if you lower below 45W for AMD and 35W for Intel, lower end CPUs end up performing almost identically, with the difference between flagship and 13600K/7700X getting under 5%.

 

But for both CPUs and GPUs, in general, as long as you don't go too low on the limit, the higher end models are the most efficient when limited.

[porina]

1 minute ago, KaitouX said:

Depending on how low you want to go with the power limit, this might not be correct. In my experience with power limiting GPUs, if you drop the power more than half it starts do drop the performance really hard

Agreed but being realistic it isn't likely for anyone to drop it that far for normal use. Depending on the model there are limits to how low you can go, in Afterburner at least. On my 4070 I can only go down to 50%. I think my 2070 which I don't have any more could only go down to 71%.