Thinking of an efficient gaming rig.

[Erranty]

So I've been considering going off-grid, and that means not having a lot of energy to play with, mostly using solar panels and deep-cycle batteries. I've been playing around with the idea of a low energy gaming rig and was wondering what you guys think!

 

So far the plan is:

i3 8300T 3.2Ghz

Cryorig - C7 cooler

MSI B360i ITX

Team Vulcan 8GB (4x2) 2400 14CAS RAM

Crucial MX500 500GB SSD 2.5''

MSI GTX 1050ti

Silverstone Sugo SG13B

SeaSonic 550W Gold Fully-Modular PSU

 

All this on PCPartpicker says the TDP is 165W. And the build is around $750 USD

 

What do you guys think?

[Streetguru]

4 minutes ago, Erranty said:

 

Just use a Ryzen APU with fast memory, entire system could be under 100W easily

Or just use any laptop...

[Electronics Wizardy]

Don't bother with the t sku, just lower the max power in the bios or windows.

 

Get a laptop if you really want lower power, but thats not bad, Id go i5 8400 though if you got the money or ryzen 2600

[Erranty]

Well, I can't get a laptop with those specs, at that price.

 

How does the 2200G compare to that 1050ti?

[Streetguru]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Don't bother with the t sku, just lower the max power in the bios or windows.

 

Get a laptop if you really want lower power, but thats not bad, Id go i5 8400 though if you got the money or ryzen 2600

Pretty sure locked means locked for intel, I can't even undervolt my old i7 2000 thinkpad

 

 

1 minute ago, Erranty said:

Well, I can't get a laptop with those specs, at that price.

 

How does the 2200G compare to that 1050ti?

You'd probably end up with an R5 2500U laptop, or maybe something with a GTX 1050

 

With proper memory speed an APU is can be a bit faster than a GT 1030 or RX 550. Memory speed just being the most important thing, can undervolt the CPU and GPU from there to drop power further. Could also be a very small system.
 

 

[Erranty]

Ah, 1030 or RX550 is a bit low for my taste. I like being able to play Dark Souls and Warframe. Considering getting into Monster Hunter again.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

Pretty sure locked means locked for intel, I can't even undervolt my old i7 2000 thinkpad

Thats only locked for max speed, not downclock. You can downclock any chip as much as you want, or limited the voltage. The voltage and power limits is board controlled and not limited by non k skus.

[Erranty]

Looking at userbenchmark, the Vega11 on the 2400G only gives around half the performance of the 1050ti. And ultimately only saves me 35W

 

I'm currently on an i5-4690k and 1060 6GB, that'd be a huge step down. I'm trying to go little steps.

[Streetguru]

9 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Thats only locked for max speed, not downclock. You can downclock any chip as much as you want, or limited the voltage. The voltage and power limits is board controlled and not limited by non k skus.

Do non Z chipset boards have that as an option?

 

 

9 minutes ago, Erranty said:

Ah, 1030 or RX550 is a bit low for my taste. I like being able to play Dark Souls and Warframe. Considering getting into Monster Hunter again.

It'll still do 1080p gaming pretty well, those games don't seem too hard to run, still getting 30fps here at 1080p high, i assume the actual game isn't in some kind of test room though. Could probably hit 60fps with some tweaks.

 

the point is that it would be really low power, I'd go for a Ryzen CPU anyways, it's more efficient than what intel offers.

You should be able to get a whole system power draw on an APU system closer to 75W or less
 

 

[Erranty]

2 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

 

Looking at that warframe video, he could've changed quite a few settings to get better performance.

 

Take off Runtime Tesselation, Volumetric Lighting, Motion Blur, and Depth of Field, then it'd probably be breaking 60FPS instead of hitting 50 and lower.

[intender]

I have a z170 itx board and a pentium g4600 with a 1050ti with 2 ssds and a 2.5" 1TB hdd.  it plays most games at 1080p med settings fairly well.  its hooked up to my 4k tv, but 4k is never gonna happen on this system.  overwatch struggles to get more than 20fps on the lowest possible settings and its not a very demanding game.  It pulls under 100W at full load.  Usually when gaming its somewhere around 70W at the wall.  I have the power limit lowered for the 1050ti and it still boosts fairly high.  I also have the cpu undervolted. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Streetguru said:

Do non Z chipset boards have that as an option?

Depends on the board, but often yes. Otherwise you can use things like xtu in windows to do this.

 

 

[Streetguru]

6 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Depends on the board, but often yes. Otherwise you can use things like xtu in windows to do this.

 

 

Could probably double my battery life if intel let me control the CPU, if only AMD had Ryzen back then.

[Electronics Wizardy]

14 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

Could probably double my battery life if intel let me control the CPU, if only AMD had Ryzen back then.

What system is this? some systems are very locked down, some aren't. Totally depends on what the bios wants to show you. Probably won't double battery life, the cpu really isn't using that much power in a laptop, esp when idle. The screen is a big power user.

[Streetguru]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What system is this? some systems are very locked down, some aren't. Totally depends on what the bios wants to show you. Probably won't double battery life, the cpu really isn't using that much power in a laptop, esp when idle. The screen is a big power user.

Thinkpad X220T with an i7 2xxx. I would probably gain a lot by undervolting it and dropping the clock down to like 1.4Ghz, not relevant anyways though...

[Electronics Wizardy]

22 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

Thinkpad X220T with an i7 2xxx. I would probably gain a lot by undervolting it and dropping the clock down to like 1.4Ghz, not relevant anyways though...

Lowering clock really won't help at all. You can already do this with speedstep and c states and thats often uses less power than forcing it into a low power state at all time.