Just built a system that I managed to get a 3080Ti for at MSRP. I’ve spent a lot of effort to have it be silent (and extremely cool) with just air cooling, eve

Just built a system that I managed to get a 3080Ti for at MSRP. I’ve spent a lot of effort to have it be silent (and extremely cool) with just air cooling, even when it does play games. With a 5900X (slight overclock for max boost at 5.1GHz), some lightly overclocked 64GB of DDR4 memory, two 27” 1440p displays, a phone dock, KB, mouse, web cam and condenser mic it idles at about 150W. General productivity, like development with a few VMs spun up, and maybe watching a 1080p video in the background? Maybe 180W. Streaming a game. So I’m capping myself at 1080p60, which does not stress the 3080Ti with all settings maxed out. Two LED light rings also on, plus an LED pendant lamp. Now we’re squarely in 350-400W land for the entire setup. Not streaming. 1440p, capping at 120fps (displays go to 170Hz). If settings are cranked up on a very recent title and I’m GPU bound, this is where the GPU alone can actually hit 400W by itself in some scenes (usually 280-350W) and the total power consumption for the room maxes at 600-650W. —- ——- There’s 6 140mm PWM case fans, the CPU has two 150mm PWM fans, and the GPU has three 92mm PWM fans. Case is all steel with sound deadening foam on both side panels. In every settings it’s silent unless I’m “going for broke” at max quality for averaging 120fps, where it’ll then be a “light whirr” once it’s heat soaked, which I’ve measured at 24.8dBA at 3 feet (~92 cm). GPU peaks at 76C, GPU memory peaks at 70C, CPU is around 65C, and system memory at 35C. All air cooled. —- ———— Here’s the thing. Come next year, it’ll be a 32-core Threadripper with 256GB of memory and a NVMe RAID 10 array for real work with Spark without constantly paying by the hour. The CPU, storage, and system memory alone will probably pull 500W under max load factoring in the displays, KB and mouse. Still will idle close to 165W though.