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Up to 600 watts of power for graphics cards with the new PCIe 5.0 powerconnector
- bob1029 5y agoEveryone tries to be fancy with wiring exotic networking in their homes, but the real performance kings are installing NEMA 14-50R in their offices right now.
- neither_color 5y agoAnecdote: A relative of mine who does home remodeling told me that over the past year most of his clients plan for dedicated office rooms now, rooms that would've been planned as guest rooms and whatnot before. They're also running 12-2 wire with 20 amp breakers to these rooms now. So yeah, not quite the laundry plugs you're describing but getting closer.
- Faaak 5y agoIt's funny because here in europe, power plugs with 16A (some are 20A) are actually the norm: at 230V they can deliver 3600W/4600W !
- ReactiveJelly 5y agoI wonder how hard it is to do a bottom-up conversion of the USA to 230. If the "all-electric" branch of the environmental movement are right, we'll eventually need to adopt the superior European kettle technology. Getting everyone on the same plug would be great.
- sidpatil 5y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4
- colejohnson66 5y agoI haven’t watched the video yet, so I don’t know if he addresses this, but: considering many devices with a switching PSU support “universal” voltage, plugging a US style plug into a 220/240V source would probably be fine.
- Someone1234 5y agoEvery single home in the US has 220 already. They're taken from 220 to 110 at the breaker for common outlets, but many large appliances (and EV chargers) already are 220. Worse kettle performance is unfortunate. But better safety is a nice side effect (in particular as the NEMA connector the US uses is dangerous/poorly designed/bad, even with the ground pin).
- cedilla 5y agoIf houses in the US are 240V, than houses in Europe are 480 (or rather, 400V because it's usually triphasic). The voltage arriving at the building is kind of irrelevant to the discussion. The question is whether a connection could even sustain the house network at double the voltage with larger appliances than it was designed for.
- Someone1234 5y ago> The voltage arriving at the building is kind of irrelevant to the discussion. My post talked about voltages arriving at appliances in US homes. Many appliances are designed and in fact receive 220 V. There's even a common (i.e. near every home) plug/wiring/breaker standard for 220 V. You're the one trying to steer the discussion towards "arriving Vs. using" whereas the first line of my post was expressly about the active use of 220 V in near every US home today (tumble dryers, ovens, central heating, EV chargers, shop equipment, etc). > The question is whether a connection could even sustain the house network at double the voltage with larger appliances than it was designed for. I don't understand what you're trying to say. A full end-to-end circuit has to be built for a specific voltage and amperage. If you want to turn a 110 V into a 220 V, you have to re-wire from the breaker otherwise the wiring will overheat and catch fire.
- bob1029 5y agoImagine how many transformers you are talking about replacing. You'd also have to redo everyone's electrical panel. It is substantially easier to run additional customer connections for those edge cases where an existing 200A residential service will not suffice.
- eertami 5y agoI was gonna say... I didn't even know overloading a power socket was a problem people had. Sometimes we'll run 5 gaming PCs + 5 monitors from one socket and it's always worked fine.
- bob1029 5y agoI've melted extension cords at lan parties before... There is always going to be a point where the # of electrical contrivances trips a certain threshold and starts causing problems. If you've ever been to dreamhack or one of those gigantic lan gaming conventions, you would probably have noticed the massive power distribution transformers staged every 300 feet or so on the floors. I honestly don't know how they would manage power delivery if every single person was running a ~1kW gaming load.
- cesarb 5y ago> power plugs with 16A [...] at 230V they can deliver 3600W/4600W That makes me a bit sad. We used to have a mess of plugs and sockets, with older plugs being either two round non-insulated pins or two equal-sized flat pins (sockets that could fit both kinds were not uncommon, but sockets which could fit only one kind were also not uncommon), and a Y with three flat pins for air conditioners, with NEMA 5-15 also being popular for computers (and we had sockets which could fit both the NEMA 5-15 "computer plug" and the other two types). We switched the whole country to a really neat new plug type (NBR 14136, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBR_14136 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBR_14136 for a few pictures), but unfortunately it's only 10A (or 20A, but that's mostly for higher-power appliances like air conditioners; nearly all sockets are going to be the 10A variant, even though the 20A socket is designed to work fine with 10A plugs). Our voltage can be either 127V or 220V depending on which city you live in (yeah, both voltages use the same plug, but that was already the case even with the older plugs), and on how your building is wired (even in places with 127V you can get 220V by wiring phase-phase instead of phase-neutral), so it's not unusual to be limited to 10A at 127V which is around 1200W only.
- bartwe 5y agoWe're going to see laws dictating max wattages for consumer computers real soon.
- Tenoke 5y ago'California's Energy Consumption Tier 2' is basically that but I believe it applies only to prebuilds currently.
- timw4mail 5y agoThis looks like some abomination of the ancient molex drive connection with part of an ATX main connection. At which point does the GPU get its own dedicated power supply?
- crest 5y agohttp://tdfx.de/ger/voodoo_volts.shtml http://tdfx.de/ger/voodoo_volts.shtml
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoWe seem to be reaching the point where I expect it'll soon make more sense to consider the GPU as the heart of the computer and the CPU as a peripheral.
- cesarb 5y agoIsn't the Raspberry Pi already there? IIRC, its main core is the GPU, and the ARM cores are one of the peripherals.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 5y agoI may be wrong but isn't on some mobile CPUs (perhaps Qualcomm?) the modem chip is the first chip on and the CPU is a peripheral.
- kevingadd 5y agoHistorically typical GPU power draw has exceeded CPU draw for a really long time. In terms of peak compute throughput the GPU usually has an advantage in any gaming-focused machine, and even general productivity ones. A developer workstation with a Threadripper probably evens things out more. A GPU these days can often do general purpose compute, but not in a way that meaningfully allows it to compete with the OS for heavily branched or random access workloads since its memory controller and execution model are a poor fit. I'm not sure we'd ever see GPUs fully displace CPUs for that reason.
- belter 5y ago
- brenelson 5y agoIt doesn't make any sense. Why do you need to have 600W to power a graphics card? Why do they need an independent power connector?
- gambiting 5y agoI'm not sure I understand your question, but I will try. >>Why do you need to have 600W to power a graphics card? You don't. There is no GPU currently that needs that much. But as cards are comfortably approaching 400W and more, a new connector is necessary so you don't end up with GPUs taking 3 or 4 existing PCIe 8-pin power connectors. This single 55-amp compatible connector allows for significantly easier routing of paths on circuit boards. >>Why do they need an independent power connector? Because the PCIe slot alone can only provide 75W of power. And if it could provide more you'd need to provide that power to the motherboard so you just moved your connector from one place to another.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nottorp 5y agoThis is insane. Give me back the 75W GPUs instead. No extra power connector, just the slot.
- bruce343434 5y agoAPUs/integrated GPUs have taken up that role.
- nottorp 5y agoBut I don't want a shit CPU. I can buy a 65 W 8C/16T CPU from AMD (which I need for more productive purposes). Why can't I pair it with a 75 W video card? Should be enough for 1080p gaming.
- sp332 5y agoIt's been a few years since the release of the GTX 1650 but it's still a pretty serviceable card. Cheap, too.
- denton-scratch 5y ago600 watts? That's one bar of a two-bar electric fire; in my youth, that two-bar fire was the only thing keeping some families warm. I mean, that power all gets turned into heat anyway in the end; so sure, if you need more heating, forget the two-bar fire, and buy a graphics controller instead - playing games with the two-bar fire isn't a good plan. I don't get why they can't make efficient GPUs. I mean, I do get that graphics depends on computation, and that all computation has an intrinsic minimum energy cost; but half a killowatt, to make a moving picture? That's more than the power supply for my gaming rig (which I retired, because the fan noise was excessive).
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago> I don't get why they can't make efficient GPUs They do make efficient GPUs, see smartphones. Even current desktop cards are efficient considering their computational power, but they are increasingly tuned to run with higher power budgets. Turns out people care more about FPS than power consumption I guess? Also consider that winning the performance crown has a halo effect for the rest of the portfolio, so the performance / high-end models are tuned towards that.
- sp332 5y agoGPUs are efficient. That's why (some) people get benefits from throwing lots of power at them. If there were a smaller difference between a 200W part and a 300W part, fewer people would upgrade.
- denton-scratch 5y agoI do appreciate that! It just seems seriously counter-intuitive to claim that spending 600W to put a moving colour picture on a screen the size of a bed-pillow counts as "efficient". [Edit: obviously it doesn't take 600W to play back an HD movie - the energy is being spent on game computations, or hashing, or something like that]
- metalliqaz 5y agoI agree it is a little out of control. Some may marvel at the incredible power available to consumers now, but I've been watching with disappointment at how each new generation is only very slightly better in the performance per watt metric. Most of the new compute power is coming from increased energy draw. In an energy-conscious environment it's quite hard to justify.
- myself248 5y agoThat looks all the world like a Micro-Fit 3.0 drawing, whose contacts are normally rated at 8.5A, but here they're claiming 9.2A each. Also, the largest Micro-Fit terminal is made for 18AWG, but the article mentions 16. https://www.molex.com/molex/products/family/microfit_30?parentKey=wire_to_board_connectors https://www.molex.com/molex/products/family/microfit_30?pare... I suspect what's happening is Molex is making a new version of the terminal with higher clamping force or better plating, to keep the temperature rise down at higher current, and larger wire grips, to accommodate the thicker conductor. (This will also allow more heat flow away from the contact.) However, the contact pitch is unchanged from 3.0mm, meaning the cavities in the housing can't grow any more, so the wire insulation thickness will be limited. That's not a big deal electrically since it's only 12 volts, but it's a consideration mechanically since the wires will be less protected against abrasion, pinching, and other damage.
- LeifCarrotson 5y agoThe current deratings are down to 5.5A for 12-circuit wire-to-board applications: https://www.molex.com/pdm_docs/ps/PS-43045-001.pdf https://www.molex.com/pdm_docs/ps/PS-43045-001.pdf But that is allowing a maximum temperature rise of 30C, it uses 18AWG wire as you say, and it's supposed to be capable of 600V AC/DC; it's not supposed to decompose/leak more than 5mA when exposed to 2200V. All of that is overkill for inside of a PC. If you're willing to limit the operating voltage to 12V and can guarantee that your board side conductors have big, multi-plane copper traces pulling heat out of the contacts to an actively cooled heat sink, you can get away with a lot that you couldn't if you were using the connector as, say, an in-line disconnect in some conduit for a 480V servo drive.
- xxpor 5y agoAt what point would it make sense to move to a 24v or 48v power standard in PCs? The dc-dc conversion world has improved a lot since ATX was invented.
- myself248 5y ago48v made sense years ago, the only reason we haven't done it is inertia. You're spot-on; the PSU is not making voltages that're directly used by components anymore, with the possible exception of 5v for USB and stuff. Everything else has a local DC-DC converter and the "12-ish" is used as an intermediate distribution standard. Pursuant to that, the ATX12VO standard is a huge step in the right direction. It ditches the 5v and 3v3 rails from the PSU and uses 12 only. This requires only modest changes to peripherals, most of which were getting most of their power from the 12v rail already. I think it's an excellent stepping stone on the way to an ATX48VO or something. That will require some more changes because a lot of popular power semiconductors are only rated to 30v or 35v or something, so there will be some push for a 24v compromise, but I think the efficiency gains with a higher voltage will ultimately win out.
- kayson 5y agoI've always wondered why CPU AIO coolers are so prevalent, but GPUs almost exclusively use air coolers. We're nearing a point where GPUs will have a TDP >2X the hungriest CPU (Threadripper), but the cooling used by most is far less effective. It's especially noticeable in smaller builds like those using mini-itx. Most of them GPU coolers draw air in from the bottom and exhaust out the sides, which doesn't really fit well the usual PC case airflow setup of draw cool air in the front and exhaust out the back and top. It seems like blower style coolers are also getting harder to find. I'm hoping my next PC can have an AIO at the intake connected to the GPU, and a large air cooler for the CPU. That makes way more sense to me than having the AIO on the CPU and an air cooler on the GPU...
- ajoy39 5y agoThe difference is that with GPUs nearly every model has a different layout of components around the actual chip, and those components need to be cooled too, so making a universal cold plate for them can be really challenging. The AIO I bought for my last computer could be used with any CPU, AMD or Intel, released in the past decade. The water block I bought for the GPU I put in my desktop two computers ago could only be used with reference designs of the AMD R9 290 or 290x. There are models of GPUs with AIOs, EVGA makes their Hydro series, Gigabyte has their waterforce series. They just usually aren't worth the cost since you have to design a new full cover block not just got every generation but also usually for different cards in the same gen too. Lastly, TDP is not a defined standard and each manufacturer defines it differently. Intel for example defines TDP as the maximum allowable power draw under full load. How that translates to actual heat output depends on architecture and process node. Intel's most recent chips for example all max out at just over 100 watts TDP, but they're known to need 200+ watts of heat dissipation for sustained workloads.
- sbradford26 5y agoA big part is that CPU sockets are very standardized and you are only cooling the CPU and not the memory and power regulators. For graphics cards the coolers need to cool the gpu along with the memory and power regulators which can be in different places depending on the manufacturer. This usually means you need a block made specifically for your model of card. You can buy those blocks and do custom water cooling but the cost of that is incredibly high. Also it finally comes down to the AIO coolers really aren't better than good air coolers. Sure AIO tend to be quieter and move the heat to a different location but on pure performance they don't crush air coolers.
- avian 5y agoWhy does the author/publisher feel the need to overlay their own logo over drawings they copied from someone else's datasheet?
- causi 5y agoTo hide the fact he's violating Amphenol ICC's copyright by using their images and stripping their copyright notice and publishing info off of them.
- skhr0680 5y agoIf someone wants to copy and paste his article, they’ll at least have to go to the effort of finding the images themselves
- szszrk 5y agoBut it clearly suggests it's his work. It isn't. Let the original author worry about how he protects his own work.
- skhr0680 5y agoI understand where you’re coming from, but just finding things can be a lot of effort. If someone wants the images with no watermark, they can look them up
- szszrk 5y agoOh, so I can go to your blog or science article with those nice, detailed posts, take all the photos you made yourself and then make a shitty article on the Internet including your hard work. I will just in case slam my own watermark, so it will look like I did it myself and will not include you as an author. Apparently this sounds fair to you!
- Gs069dndIYk 5y agoYou're posting this on a site where the admin encourages users to post archive links to bypass paywalls. Wrong place for arguments that content creators get their fair share.
- noobermin 5y agoI'll be honest, it's very hard for me to imagine what I would do that would demand anywhere near 600 watts for a graphics card alone. I mean my PC can draw at most 120 watts and that feels like a lot, although the PC is pretty old by now. All of this for crypto? How many games are there out there that draw anywhere near this level of wattage just for graphics?
- ksec 5y ago4K Gaming at 120FPS with Ray Tracing would easily push pass 300 to 400W. Even on a hypothetical 5nm GPU.
- noobermin 5y agoOk, this is a tangent, but this kind of stuff irks me. Is there no love anymore for making things pretty enough but actually keeping things efficient? Do game devs (even AAA people) not like the family of things like 0x5F3759DF anymore? Efficiency aside, simply pushing the power requirements doesn't even bring home the bacon. Nintendo's "lateral thinking with withered technology" works super well, just look at the switch compared to any of the consoles of its generation. I know PC gaming is different but even there people dig streams of undertale over cyberpunk (although cyberpunk had issues...), so not everything is pushing power requirements. Literally, if all that matters is "realism" and "power" and pushing that boundary is an end in and of itself, well that boundary is already pushed by others. I mean may be not with a GPU but I work in HPC and I'm sure as hell my simulations draw more than 600W. So, this is a push for power in games specifically and that just starts to draw out my boomer side and wonder why people just don't try to go back and optimize their code first.
- CJefferson 5y agoGamedev is still full of clever people pushing graphics cards to their limits. The kinds of tricks are different nowadays, as most of the work is done on the GPU, and the important thing is to keep it busy with highly parallel, branchless code with good memory locality.
- jscipione 5y agoThis is still nowhere near as elegant as Apple’s MPX connector which eliminates the extra cabling altogether.
- resist_futility 5y agoI would rather pay for a $10 cable than 100x that for a motherboard
- soylentnewsorg 5y agoIt's not, because if you plugged a device needing 600W using an MPX connector, it wouldn't work at all, since MPX can only do 500W. Here's the thing. When you have a lot of amps, they create noise in wires next to them. They'll also need thick wires and will get hot. When you have a lot of volts, they'll go through shielding and start a fire. Do you really want to place something with a lot of amps and volts next to something that's transmitting timed high-bandwidth data, like a graphics card? Or run the entire output of your big PSU box that needs a bunch of fans, through the motherboard? For a tower form factor? The single slot for power and data is convenient for phones and laptops. Not something that's 600W and is going to power a space heater in its next kilowatt+ iteration.
- dingaling 5y agoGiven the RF noise and the heavy-duty electrical engineering, wouldn't it be better to isolate the GPU in its own external enclosure?
- soylentnewsorg 5y agothe RF noise form computer components is enough to be taken care of by regular metallic shielding, because the amps are low for actual compute operations. an inch of space on its own is an effective barrier. this is very different than having a wire running enough amps to power a space heater, located next to your data transmission lines. even having the GPU in its own external enclosure, you would not want the data cable to be bundled with the power cable for anything that pulls over half a kilowatt.
- ksec 5y agoThis is long overdue, for something I have been questioning since 2016. ( Our GPUs are severely TDP limited ) It is also interesting on one hand you have Apple pushing CPU and GPU integration for maximum efficiency. Where Apple could make a potential 300W TDP SoC for their Mac Pro. On the other hand you have CPU pushing to 400W ( and higher in the future ) while GPU pushing to 600W.
- httpz 5y agoAssuming you can install two GPUs using 600W, that's basically running a hair dryer in your desktop since most of the energy is converted to heat.
- oatmeal_croc 5y agoWell, all the energy is eventually converted to heat.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ksec 5y agoThis got me thinking. ( I must be missing something or having wrong assumption in my high overview of the issue. ) Do Crypto People use their GPU generated heat as heater assuming they lives in a place that requires heating anyway? Doesn't that equate to free money assuming they could actually mine crypto?
- saberdancer 5y agoYes. That's one of the benefits. Some people use electric heating even without crypto so using GPUs to mine crypto to get the same effect is a no brainer. Problem is that during the summer you have to get rid of the excess heat, so you need air conditioning or perhaps open air cooling. Not gonna lie, I've used my GPU to heat up my small room before.
- denton-scratch 5y ago> so you need air conditioning or perhaps open air cooling. Or icebergs - Reyjavik is a popular place to build data-centres, so I have heard. They also have good geothermal in those parts.
- reportgunner 5y agoIm no expert but coupled with solar panels you get more power during summer to run the AC
- jl6 5y agoI’ve always thought of gaming as a virtuous low-impact form of entertainment, insofar as it displaces real-world pursuits like foreign ski holidays, gasoline-powered road trips, or land-hogging golf courses. But burning nearly a kilowatt on a gaming rig feels like a step too far. Sure, the power could be sourced from wind or solar plants, but there’s still a level of excessive conspicuous consumption going on here that doesn’t sit right with me.
- unglaublich 5y agoWhy? Your home heating consumes 5-50kW. In colder climates, the power consumption will be compensated by less home heating.
- tgv 5y agoEven if, in warmer climates the offset will be doubled by the AC.
- fomine3 5y ago5kW minimum, seriously? Not 5kWh/day?
- bestouff 5y agoif you compare that with an inefficient electric heater. Otherwise, your gaming gear will consume way more electricity for the same heating power than, say, a heat pump.
- tgb 5y agoTrue but doesn't change the conclusions dramatically, does it? If a heat pump is twice as efficient as electrical heating then you're still displacing half the wattage from your rig with reduced heating. On the other hand, taking heat into account just makes matters worse in the summer, and I haven't known a gamer who takes half the year off.
- timw4mail 5y agoAn electric heater is ~100% efficient. The power generation is much less efficient. The heat pump can be effectively more than 100% efficient, but that's because it's moving heat.
- DeathArrow 5y agoI wonder what will be the MSRP for 3090 TI and what the actual price in stores would be. Even mid tier GPUs like 3070 cost a lot of money.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoThe 3080 Ti is north of $3k, so...even more north of that.