APU with a GPU idle

[markfrancis905]

Hello all,

 

I mainly use my PC the same way any one would in a home office. Very low resource utilization, just a browser and some music.

 

5% of the time I play games, but don't want the excess power and heat than comes from a dedicated GPU during the 95% usage.

 

I'm thinking of a build with an APU and a GPU. With this setup, how does the PC assign graphics jobs? Does the APU component get circumvented? Basically, I want a GPU to be idle until I fire up a game, but still have a great experience on the desktop with just the APU.

 

Is this possible?

[FireFox]

If you put in a video card, I think the i-GPU will become disactivated and it'll use the dedicated card, what graphics jobs will it be doing?

[cjeffcoatjr]

You will always have a GPU running, as long as you are looking at a monitor. 

[Freaky_spider]

go passive? if you wont be gaming to much and silence is off most importances, i would go passive , dont expect the best grafics in newer games but it will be 100 percent silent

[WoodenMarker]

I forgot what it was but Intel had something like that where you would seamlessly switch from the gpu to the cpu's integrated graphics.

This is kind of pointless though. You could just get an AMD graphics card that supports ZeroCore which would make it consume very little power and have a very low heat output when you're at idle and when you're not doing much. The gpu will literally shut down when your monitor goes into standby mode.

[FireFox]

I forgot what it was but Intel had something like that where you would seamlessly switch from the gpu to the cpu.

This is kind of pointless though. You could just get an AMD graphics card that supports ZeroCore which would make it consume very little power and have a very low heat output when you're at idle and when you're not doing much. The gpu will literally shut down when your monitor goes into standby mode.

 

Agreed or just stick with the i-GPU and cut the video card out all together