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There are rumours going around that the GeForce 4090 is going to have a max TDP of 650W. It seems insane but if true then consider that the combination of CPU

There are rumours going around that the GeForce 4090 is going to have a max TDP of 650W. It seems insane but if true then consider that the combination of CPU and GPU is going to be 840W, and that is before the rest of the system is taken into account. At some point we are going to need to start worrying about installing dedicated venting for computers to the outside of the house. At some point you need to start integrating desktop computers into your HVAC designs. At some point you need to start having dedicated electric circuits installed like for your oven. My current computer (5950X with 3080) was already hot enough when gaming that I found it physically uncomfortable to have it under my desk and had to move it out from under there. My legs were burning up.

jmnicolas 5y ago
At some point we need to realize that wasting so much electricity for gaming isn't reasonable.
- majou 5y ago
  How do you feel about cinema?
  - jmnicolas 5y ago
    What do you mean?
- Arrath 5y ago
  Steam's hardware survey points to the majority of people staying well away from this cutting edge hardware.
Jaygles 5y ago
Undervolting the 3080 can help a lot with thermals and sacrifices minimal performance up to a point. I undervolted my 3090 and it improved thermals by like 5-10c depending on the workload which lowered the fan noise and as a bonus lowered the coil whine. I don't have numbers on the power draw though but it should be a significant difference
- BurnGpuBurn 5y ago
  To be honest, a 1500 dollar grapics card that has audible coil whine is appalling. Why didn't you RMA it?
  - Jaygles 5y ago
    I did RMA it once. The new one had the same issue and it took a month to get to me. So I didn't want to go through that again. The coil whine also only happens on certain games. Most of the time there isn't any
    - BuckRogers 5y ago
      Make sure you take the case cover off and get a paper towel roll and put it up to your ear. See if the sound actually is the GPU or the PSU. I've had this a time or two, swore it was the GPU and it wasn't. RMA'd the PSU and my "GPU coil whine" was gone.
- redisman 5y ago
  I ran a beefy (3 power inputs) 3080 undervolted and you don’t really lose more than a few percentage points of performance and it ran great on my 650W with a 3700X. I much prefer a little performance hit to loud fans
- nicolaslem 5y ago
  Undervolting can even improve performance: my stock 5700 xt runs at 1.2V and reaches 110°C hotspot. It then drops the frequency a few hundred MHz to stay below the temperature threshold. By running it at 1.1V it reaches 90°C hotspot, below the 110°C threshold so it runs at maximum frequency constantly. Many GPUs (and CPUs) have their stock voltage quite high because it improves yield for the manufacturer. Unless a GPU is really bottom of the barrel regarding silicon lottery, it can usually be undervolted without issues. This is however less true for flagship models which are already pushing the silicon as far as it can.
  - akiselev 5y ago
kitsunesoba 5y ago
It really is insane, and limits upgradability of even brand new machines. Point in case, I have a newly built Ryzen 5900X tower that reuses a GPU from an old build. I chose a high quality 80+ Platinum 750W PSU thinking that would give more than enough headroom for upgrading the GPU at some point, but if the next generation of GPUs are as power hungry as rumored I’ll be limited to current generation cards unless I buy a new PSU. I hope efficiency comes to be a focal point again soon, because if the trend continues you’ll need a 1kW PSU just to comfortably accommodate current enthusiast parts and have any hope of upgrading in the future, which is ridiculous.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  With what the GPU will cost you will not see the price of a better PSU as more than a speedbump. You can also sell your old one to recoup some of it. Even so, 1KW+ personal computers are a bit strange, back in the day the very largest workstations (think IRIX fridges) were in that domain. What would be nicer would be if manufacturers aimed for minimal power consumption with the same performance as a previous generation to give people the option.
  - scoopdewoop 5y ago
    A GTX 1660 ti is basically a 1070, but lower power. The whole 16 series is like that.
oblak 5y ago
Sadly, not rumours. Next gen video cards from AMD/nvidia are going to cost a lot of money and eat many, many watts. I mean, we can live with that waste heat during the winter but I am not looking forward to having a 1kw spewing PC next to me in my gaming room
- Chris_Newton 5y ago
  This seems crazy to me. I run an entire home office, sometimes with a reasonably powerful main workstation (enough for things like 3D graphics work), a second PC or laptop, and various server and networking equipment all running at once, and unless we’re also using something power-intensive like a laser printer the entire room doesn't draw 1kW!
  - oblak 5y ago
    I was also surprised but the "leaks" have been pretty consistent. Certainly not looking forward into having a 600W GPU in my tine gaming room
baybal2 5y ago
> There are rumours going around that the GeForce 4090 is going to have a max TDP of 650W. You will need a small DC welding machine for a power supply.
- gambiting 5y ago
  I mean, 1000W power supplies are really not a big deal at all, but yeah, that's a lot of heat going into my room that I'd rather not have.
  - ant6n 5y ago
    Put the pc in a different room, run some cable for monitor, peripherals, drives. I wonder whether there's a way to extend the power button.
    - righttoolforjob 5y ago
      > I wonder whether there's a way to extend the power button. Any pair of wires will do...
      - c21h30o2 5y ago
        Can even put a button on the end. Something dramatic like a nuclear launch button.
        Arrath 5y ago
        Finally, an excuse for a big button with a safety glass cover on it.
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      This starts to get really tricky when you pair the multi-thousand dollars class computer that pumps out a kilowatt of heat under load with equally good monitor(s). I had a hard enough time finding quality DP cables getting 4k144 HDR to go 2 meters to reach across the desk, none of the 3 meter ones I tried at the time worked. 8k120 HDR to the TV was the same on HDMI. >10 Gbps USB/Thunderbolt are also a pain longer than a desk's length away but not the end of the world. Things like the power button are the easiest, just pop them into some single pin jumper extenders and you're good to go for any reasonable distance.
spullara 5y ago
I currently have a couple machines in a room and it heats up so much I had to get a separate window AC in addition to central air.
Macha 5y ago
Something like a QX9770 + SLI 680s could use similar power to a 12900k + 4090, which is similar in market positioning as the "halo product" now vs 10 years ago. The difference now is as more and more people who grew up gaming are now in the employed professional category, there are more people looking at what would have been the ultimate top end setups back then.
dlevine 5y ago
I just upgraded my PSU from 500W -> 750W when I got my RTX 3070 (I'm running a 5600X). Seeing this makes me worried that maybe it wasn't quite enough.
mise_en_place 5y ago
FWIW I consider the thermals a feature, not a bug. Helps save on the heating bill, plus my house is already very well insulated. I have noticed that my Radeon 5500 XT has better thermals when passed thru to a Windows VM. It would seem that Linux kernel 5.15 has better thermals/fan control for amdgpu, I’m on a slightly older version.
- mastax 5y ago
  I'm not into cryptocurrency, but I'm mining on my desktop right now because it's like running a space heater that pays for itself.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> There are rumours going around that the GeForce 4090 is going to have a max TDP of 650W. This is kind of a move of desperation. GPUs are massively parallel so it's straightforward to make performance scale linearly with power consumption. They could always have done this. Nvidia is used to not having strong competition. Now AMD and Intel are both gunning for them and the market share is theirs to lose. Things like this are an attempt to stay on top. But the competition could just do the same thing, so what good is it?
- fomine3 5y ago
  GeForce uses Samsung 8nm that is obviously behind to competitors but their GeForce is still competitive. It means their design itself is great. Nvidia is lose the fab race, or don't want to pay more for advanced TSMC fab.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    They all just use whoever they want. Not long ago AMD was on Samsung/GloFo 14nm and Nvidia on TSMC 12nm. GeForce 4090 is supposed to be on TSMC 5nm. The RTX 3080 (Samsung 8N) is slower than the RX 6900 (TSMC N7) and has a 20W higher TDP. The RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090 are faster but have a 50W higher TDP. Their design isn't magic, they're just compensating for the worse process technology by using more power.
AussieWog93 5y ago
More interesting than this is what's caused the performance expectation of gamers to rise faster than Moore's Law. It took us almost 10 years to move the standard from 1024x768 to 1920x1080 (~2.5x increase in pixels/sec), yet in the past 5 years we've gone from 1920x1080@60Hz to 4k@120Hz (~8x increase). I'm not sure if it's because graphics aren't naturally improving the same way they were in the 00s and early 2010s, or streaming culture showing things off with the highest resolutions and framerates possible, but it's absolutely a modern phenomenon and I'm not sure how long it can last.
- kungito 5y ago
  I'm not sure which setup and games you are thinking about but if I'm not mistaken, right now we are still struggling with 1440p@60hz for ubisoft games and other AAAs
- jpalomaki 5y ago
  Maybe this is driven by the increase in disposable income. Many avid gamers likely want the best possible rig (in terms of computing power) they can comfortably afford. Hardware vendors try to meet this demand. Powerful setups are useless without games that benefit from power. This creates a demand for super highres graphics, even though those might not add much to the actual gameplay experience.
- Macha 5y ago
  I don't think 4k120 today is in the same market position as 1080p60 5 years ago. 5 years ago 1080p60 was the bar, if your device couldn't do 1080p60, it wasn't a gaming product, it was a business product. I don't think 4k120 is there, I think we're just at the bar where 1440p60 is considered at that level. In that time, the higher end target has moved from 1440p60 or 4k30 to 1440p120 or 4k60, which means the halo products now have to promise 4k120 to keep ahead of the merely high end. I think the current increase in interest in high refresh rate gaming came from the shift away from TN panels. Once IPS became reasonably available, companies with TN products couldn't push for them as premium products from an image quality perspective, but high refresh rate was something they could still market with TN that there was a window where IPS and VA could not do that. So they did, gamers got exposed to high refresh rates and then moved those expectations to other products. Also tech like gsync/freesync meant that if your monitor had a higher refresh rate than your hardware could produce, you no longer had to deal with tearing. I think monitor tech is leading GPU tech at the moment, with 1440p240 and 4k120 monitors. There's certainly _some_ games where those resolution/framerate combinations are achievable, mostly esports titles and older/smaller titles, but for the most part, no (also for me at least, past like 90hz you're into dimishing returns territory). But now people have these monitors capable of X resolution and Y refresh rate, people want to have their cake and eat it, wanting games that have modern effects for higher fidelity and yet also higher fps to take advantage of their monitors.
tomcam 5y ago
> At some point you need to start integrating desktop computers into your HVAC designs. I think you have that reversed
op00to 5y ago
My 3080ti actually heats up the large basement office about at the same rate as my 1.5kw solid state amateur radio amp. Pretty fast. Sucked in the summer but looking forward to the winter! I have dedicated circuits for both my gaming pc (120v) and the amp (230v). It didn’t cost all that much while we were doing electric work anyway.
rawoke083600 5y ago
Right !! Lol maybe we need like a "core-web-vitals" moment/movement in hardware !
MaxikCZ 5y ago
My 3080 with 3900 had a similar problem. I solved it by using two extra fans positioned outside the case, tucked between the side panel of my table and a wall, just under the top desk. It takes the hottest air (coz its right below the desk plane) and blows it along the wall to the side. I have them running at, I think, 350 rpm (14 cm fans), so you cant hear them at all and it doesnt feel like any significant amount of air is moving, but the temperature under my desk dropped to comfortable, almost ambient levels. The fans are, via extension cables included with extra fans I bought, plugged directly into motherboard, zhe cable pulled trough opening for second gpu connectors.
ConcernedCoder 5y ago
Wait...so I can super compute AND heat my winter home at the same time?!?!?
hulitu 5y ago
> At some point you need to start having dedicated electric circuits installed like for your oven. At some point Intel and Nvidia shall start using their brain. VLSI design is hard, but this is no excuse for making crappy products.

jmnicolas 5y ago

At some point we need to realize that wasting so much electricity for gaming isn't reasonable.

majou 5y ago
How do you feel about cinema?
- jmnicolas 5y ago
  What do you mean?
Arrath 5y ago
Steam's hardware survey points to the majority of people staying well away from this cutting edge hardware.

Jaygles 5y ago

Undervolting the 3080 can help a lot with thermals and sacrifices minimal performance up to a point. I undervolted my 3090 and it improved thermals by like 5-10c depending on the workload which lowered the fan noise and as a bonus lowered the coil whine. I don't have numbers on the power draw though but it should be a significant difference

BurnGpuBurn 5y ago
To be honest, a 1500 dollar grapics card that has audible coil whine is appalling. Why didn't you RMA it?
- Jaygles 5y ago
  I did RMA it once. The new one had the same issue and it took a month to get to me. So I didn't want to go through that again. The coil whine also only happens on certain games. Most of the time there isn't any
  - BuckRogers 5y ago
    Make sure you take the case cover off and get a paper towel roll and put it up to your ear. See if the sound actually is the GPU or the PSU. I've had this a time or two, swore it was the GPU and it wasn't. RMA'd the PSU and my "GPU coil whine" was gone.
redisman 5y ago
I ran a beefy (3 power inputs) 3080 undervolted and you don’t really lose more than a few percentage points of performance and it ran great on my 650W with a 3700X. I much prefer a little performance hit to loud fans
nicolaslem 5y ago
Undervolting can even improve performance: my stock 5700 xt runs at 1.2V and reaches 110°C hotspot. It then drops the frequency a few hundred MHz to stay below the temperature threshold. By running it at 1.1V it reaches 90°C hotspot, below the 110°C threshold so it runs at maximum frequency constantly. Many GPUs (and CPUs) have their stock voltage quite high because it improves yield for the manufacturer. Unless a GPU is really bottom of the barrel regarding silicon lottery, it can usually be undervolted without issues. This is however less true for flagship models which are already pushing the silicon as far as it can.
- akiselev 5y ago

kitsunesoba 5y ago

It really is insane, and limits upgradability of even brand new machines. Point in case, I have a newly built Ryzen 5900X tower that reuses a GPU from an old build. I chose a high quality 80+ Platinum 750W PSU thinking that would give more than enough headroom for upgrading the GPU at some point, but if the next generation of GPUs are as power hungry as rumored I’ll be limited to current generation cards unless I buy a new PSU. I hope efficiency comes to be a focal point again soon, because if the trend continues you’ll need a 1kW PSU just to comfortably accommodate current enthusiast parts and have any hope of upgrading in the future, which is ridiculous.

jacquesm 5y ago
With what the GPU will cost you will not see the price of a better PSU as more than a speedbump. You can also sell your old one to recoup some of it. Even so, 1KW+ personal computers are a bit strange, back in the day the very largest workstations (think IRIX fridges) were in that domain. What would be nicer would be if manufacturers aimed for minimal power consumption with the same performance as a previous generation to give people the option.
- scoopdewoop 5y ago
  A GTX 1660 ti is basically a 1070, but lower power. The whole 16 series is like that.

oblak 5y ago

Sadly, not rumours. Next gen video cards from AMD/nvidia are going to cost a lot of money and eat many, many watts. I mean, we can live with that waste heat during the winter but I am not looking forward to having a 1kw spewing PC next to me in my gaming room

Chris_Newton 5y ago
This seems crazy to me. I run an entire home office, sometimes with a reasonably powerful main workstation (enough for things like 3D graphics work), a second PC or laptop, and various server and networking equipment all running at once, and unless we’re also using something power-intensive like a laser printer the entire room doesn't draw 1kW!
- oblak 5y ago
  I was also surprised but the "leaks" have been pretty consistent. Certainly not looking forward into having a 600W GPU in my tine gaming room

baybal2 5y ago

> There are rumours going around that the GeForce 4090 is going to have a max TDP of 650W. You will need a small DC welding machine for a power supply.

gambiting 5y ago
I mean, 1000W power supplies are really not a big deal at all, but yeah, that's a lot of heat going into my room that I'd rather not have.
- ant6n 5y ago
  Put the pc in a different room, run some cable for monitor, peripherals, drives. I wonder whether there's a way to extend the power button.
  - righttoolforjob 5y ago
    > I wonder whether there's a way to extend the power button. Any pair of wires will do...
    - c21h30o2 5y ago
      Can even put a button on the end. Something dramatic like a nuclear launch button.
      - Arrath 5y ago
        Finally, an excuse for a big button with a safety glass cover on it.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    This starts to get really tricky when you pair the multi-thousand dollars class computer that pumps out a kilowatt of heat under load with equally good monitor(s). I had a hard enough time finding quality DP cables getting 4k144 HDR to go 2 meters to reach across the desk, none of the 3 meter ones I tried at the time worked. 8k120 HDR to the TV was the same on HDMI. >10 Gbps USB/Thunderbolt are also a pain longer than a desk's length away but not the end of the world. Things like the power button are the easiest, just pop them into some single pin jumper extenders and you're good to go for any reasonable distance.

spullara 5y ago

I currently have a couple machines in a room and it heats up so much I had to get a separate window AC in addition to central air.

Macha 5y ago

Something like a QX9770 + SLI 680s could use similar power to a 12900k + 4090, which is similar in market positioning as the "halo product" now vs 10 years ago. The difference now is as more and more people who grew up gaming are now in the employed professional category, there are more people looking at what would have been the ultimate top end setups back then.

dlevine 5y ago

I just upgraded my PSU from 500W -> 750W when I got my RTX 3070 (I'm running a 5600X). Seeing this makes me worried that maybe it wasn't quite enough.

mise_en_place 5y ago

FWIW I consider the thermals a feature, not a bug. Helps save on the heating bill, plus my house is already very well insulated. I have noticed that my Radeon 5500 XT has better thermals when passed thru to a Windows VM. It would seem that Linux kernel 5.15 has better thermals/fan control for amdgpu, I’m on a slightly older version.

mastax 5y ago
I'm not into cryptocurrency, but I'm mining on my desktop right now because it's like running a space heater that pays for itself.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> There are rumours going around that the GeForce 4090 is going to have a max TDP of 650W. This is kind of a move of desperation. GPUs are massively parallel so it's straightforward to make performance scale linearly with power consumption. They could always have done this. Nvidia is used to not having strong competition. Now AMD and Intel are both gunning for them and the market share is theirs to lose. Things like this are an attempt to stay on top. But the competition could just do the same thing, so what good is it?

fomine3 5y ago
GeForce uses Samsung 8nm that is obviously behind to competitors but their GeForce is still competitive. It means their design itself is great. Nvidia is lose the fab race, or don't want to pay more for advanced TSMC fab.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  They all just use whoever they want. Not long ago AMD was on Samsung/GloFo 14nm and Nvidia on TSMC 12nm. GeForce 4090 is supposed to be on TSMC 5nm. The RTX 3080 (Samsung 8N) is slower than the RX 6900 (TSMC N7) and has a 20W higher TDP. The RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090 are faster but have a 50W higher TDP. Their design isn't magic, they're just compensating for the worse process technology by using more power.

AussieWog93 5y ago

More interesting than this is what's caused the performance expectation of gamers to rise faster than Moore's Law. It took us almost 10 years to move the standard from 1024x768 to 1920x1080 (~2.5x increase in pixels/sec), yet in the past 5 years we've gone from 1920x1080@60Hz to 4k@120Hz (~8x increase). I'm not sure if it's because graphics aren't naturally improving the same way they were in the 00s and early 2010s, or streaming culture showing things off with the highest resolutions and framerates possible, but it's absolutely a modern phenomenon and I'm not sure how long it can last.

kungito 5y ago
I'm not sure which setup and games you are thinking about but if I'm not mistaken, right now we are still struggling with 1440p@60hz for ubisoft games and other AAAs
jpalomaki 5y ago
Maybe this is driven by the increase in disposable income. Many avid gamers likely want the best possible rig (in terms of computing power) they can comfortably afford. Hardware vendors try to meet this demand. Powerful setups are useless without games that benefit from power. This creates a demand for super highres graphics, even though those might not add much to the actual gameplay experience.
Macha 5y ago
I don't think 4k120 today is in the same market position as 1080p60 5 years ago. 5 years ago 1080p60 was the bar, if your device couldn't do 1080p60, it wasn't a gaming product, it was a business product. I don't think 4k120 is there, I think we're just at the bar where 1440p60 is considered at that level. In that time, the higher end target has moved from 1440p60 or 4k30 to 1440p120 or 4k60, which means the halo products now have to promise 4k120 to keep ahead of the merely high end. I think the current increase in interest in high refresh rate gaming came from the shift away from TN panels. Once IPS became reasonably available, companies with TN products couldn't push for them as premium products from an image quality perspective, but high refresh rate was something they could still market with TN that there was a window where IPS and VA could not do that. So they did, gamers got exposed to high refresh rates and then moved those expectations to other products. Also tech like gsync/freesync meant that if your monitor had a higher refresh rate than your hardware could produce, you no longer had to deal with tearing. I think monitor tech is leading GPU tech at the moment, with 1440p240 and 4k120 monitors. There's certainly _some_ games where those resolution/framerate combinations are achievable, mostly esports titles and older/smaller titles, but for the most part, no (also for me at least, past like 90hz you're into dimishing returns territory). But now people have these monitors capable of X resolution and Y refresh rate, people want to have their cake and eat it, wanting games that have modern effects for higher fidelity and yet also higher fps to take advantage of their monitors.

tomcam 5y ago

> At some point you need to start integrating desktop computers into your HVAC designs. I think you have that reversed

op00to 5y ago

My 3080ti actually heats up the large basement office about at the same rate as my 1.5kw solid state amateur radio amp. Pretty fast. Sucked in the summer but looking forward to the winter! I have dedicated circuits for both my gaming pc (120v) and the amp (230v). It didn’t cost all that much while we were doing electric work anyway.

rawoke083600 5y ago

Right !! Lol maybe we need like a "core-web-vitals" moment/movement in hardware !

MaxikCZ 5y ago

My 3080 with 3900 had a similar problem. I solved it by using two extra fans positioned outside the case, tucked between the side panel of my table and a wall, just under the top desk. It takes the hottest air (coz its right below the desk plane) and blows it along the wall to the side. I have them running at, I think, 350 rpm (14 cm fans), so you cant hear them at all and it doesnt feel like any significant amount of air is moving, but the temperature under my desk dropped to comfortable, almost ambient levels. The fans are, via extension cables included with extra fans I bought, plugged directly into motherboard, zhe cable pulled trough opening for second gpu connectors.

ConcernedCoder 5y ago

Wait...so I can super compute AND heat my winter home at the same time?!?!?

hulitu 5y ago

> At some point you need to start having dedicated electric circuits installed like for your oven. At some point Intel and Nvidia shall start using their brain. VLSI design is hard, but this is no excuse for making crappy products.