HWMonitor readings.

[Okjoek]

Decided to install HWMonitor to compare a few GPUs of ours and some results I got with my i5 3450 + Sapphire Nitro RX 460 setup are as follows (After a 5 hour gaming session of Planetside 2)

 

The CPU under my M9i cooler had a minimum clock of 1596 MHz. It appears to have been able to turbo up to 3492 MHz. The CPU Package reached a temperature of 73 degrees C. It looks like the CPU Package was drawing 34.3 Watts at its peak.

 

The GPU had a minimum clock of 214 MHz and a maximum of 1750 MHz. Temperature maxed at 78 degrees C. It looks like the GPU was drawing 72.04 Watts at its peak. 

 

I like to reduce my electricity draw It's a dream of mine to one day work totally off of solar/wind power. I'm happy to see the GPU staying under 75W even though it has a 6-pin connector to the PSU. I wonder is a CPU upgrade to a modern 65W chip like Ryzen/Coffee lake would reduce CPU power. An APU would drastically reduce power draw, but I don't want to give up that 4GB of GDDR5 of my dedicated GPU.

[Hugs12343]

4 minutes ago, Okjoek said:

I like to reduce my electricity draw It's a dream of mine to one day work totally off of solar/wind power.

If you really want to reduce power draw, you can undervolt your cpu. Which means going into the BIOS/UEFI and reducing the cpu core voltage my a fraction then booting up and running a stress test to see if it's stable. Only reduce about 50mV at a time. You must stress cpu for atleast 2-3 hours once you feel that you have reduced the voltage enough.

 

This thread is a good guide.

[Guest]

I mean you probably could run that off solar/wind. I reckon you could run a Ryzen 5 1600 and 1050 Ti (with no PCIe power connectors) off solar/wind.

[Hugs12343]

I might add that getting a better power supply might be a good idea. You certanly don't need a 650w psu (as it says in your signature) to power that system. a 450w would do just fine. So if you invest in a highly efficient power supply (look for 80+ gold or above) you will reduce power draw.

[Okjoek]

1 hour ago, Hugs12343 said:

I might add that getting a better power supply might be a good idea. You certanly don't need a 650w psu (as it says in your signature) to power that system. a 450w would do just fine. So if you invest in a highly efficient power supply (look for 80+ gold or above) you will reduce power draw.

Yeah, it's just a PSU we had lying around from one of my brothers. I forget why he never used it, I think he used it to get another old system working before he just got another prebuilt system and didn't need it anymore.

 

Does Undervolting work on locked CPUs do you know? Just curious.

I could wait a few gens and see how they improve on the already great APUs. DDR5 system memory might help when that comes out hopefully also when we start getting 7nm stuff like zen 2 and Navi.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Hugs12343 said:

I might add that getting a better power supply might be a good idea. You certanly don't need a 650w psu (as it says in your signature) to power that system. a 450w would do just fine. So if you invest in a highly efficient power supply (look for 80+ gold or above) you will reduce power draw.

Not necessarily.  Depends on the PSU on hand versus the one being replaced.

 

And don't forget that 80 PLUS only measures those PSUs down to 10% (on anything but Titanium).

 

Besides, without know what's paid per kWH and the actual kWH consumption, do you know if there's an ROI for replacing a known working PSU with another?

 

[Okjoek]

Why the hell was this moved to Cases and Power Supplies?

 

Anyways. The key reasons I don't prefer APUs isn't that they themselves are underpowered, it's that I like being able to have numerous outputs (DisplayPort has become a favorite in my case and isn't as common on motherboards) that are on a modular part that can utilize 4+ GB of dedicated memory which as far as I know is suited to the tasks GPU perform because of the higher bandwidth. (I heard somewhere that it's something like ~270 GB/s on GDDR5 vs ~25GB/s on DDR4. I heard that a while ago so IDK if it's accurate at all.)