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yet at some point we tend to throw efficiency at the wall for raw compute. it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything high

by dijit 3y ago

yet at some point we tend to throw efficiency at the wall for raw compute. it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's. Of course such PSU's are undoubtedly more efficient at doing the conversion. What I mean is that the argument of (power) efficiency doesn't hold when we actually end up using significant more power anyway. Also, to play devils advocate a bit, that's a 20yo PC: how many times would you have upgraded in 20 years- and what is the carbon cost of all of those upgrades? Some PC manufacturing is pretty bad for the environment. I'd guess once every 3-5 years? According to "8 Billion Trees": > the Carbon Footprint of a Computer? A desktop computer emits 778 kgs of CO2e annually. Of this, 85% results from emissions during manufacture and shipping, and 15% results from electricity consumption when in use. https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-footprint-of-a-laptop/#:~:text=What%20Is%20the%20Carbon%20Footprint%20of%20a%20Computer%3F,electricity%20consumption%20when%20in%20use https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-foot.... So you have to really ask yourself: when is that upfront cost paid for by the inefficiency of energy use (which can be sourced sustainably unlike many parts of PC manufacture)? 20 years? Sure, but it's still very questionable at 10 years. If only we didn't force people to upgrade their computers by making more and more features non-optional and slowing down the computing experience for the sake of producing features easier for developers. --- EDIT: I can't stop thinking abut this; I think I've been nerd sniped: I can't find good data on this though, it seems like a new laptop costs the planet 422.5kgs of CO2e on average. The actual running cost of the Pentium 4 (mobo, ram, etc) itself is somewhere around 40w for this generation (not including peripherals, discrete GPU or screen) - it does not have speedstep so can't power down. a high end dGPU from the era runs about the the same as the entire PC. so let's double that 40w. -- we ignore peripherals and screens as those could be the same for both new and old PC's. 80w used roughly for 8hrs per day? That comes to about 292kW a year roughly. In the US energy generation costs 0.3712kgs CO2e per kWh; so something like 109kgs of CO2e for running this PC for a year. Meaning even if your energy efficiency of a new PC doubled (using 40w instead of 80w) it would take nearly 5 years to offset the carbon cost of a new PC. Not discounting that energy production can be carbon neutral. That said, currently: The most efficient x86 computer will consume 10W to 25W at idle.

hakfoo 3y ago
> it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU I'd say that 250-350 watt PSUs were very common in white-box/home-built PCs in the P4/Athlon XP era. 400W and above, yes, that was much less common. I can recall at that point in time, Enermax made their name selling some of the largest PSUs on the mainstream market, and that line tended to be like 450-600W units. I do sort of agree, it's almost completely about GPUs these days. The spinning rust is now low-power flash. A top Ryzen 9 or Core i9 might top out at 150-250W, but that's not that much higher than Prescott on a bad day, and plenty of people are picking models in the <100 watt power classes. However, the idea of a 400W-by-itself GPU was completely off the field in the early 2000s.
- userbinator 3y ago
  I'd say that 250-350 watt PSUs were very common in white-box/home-built PCs in the P4/Athlon XP era. ...and the vast majority of those PSUs were cheap off-brand units actually rated in unrealistic "Chinese watts", with 150-200 being all they could honestly deliver for anything short of brief spikes.
Roark66 3y ago
>it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's Exactly that. I just had to upgrade my 850W psu to 1000W because I'm upgrading my gpu to an rtx 3090. This is why if you want the absolutely most power efficient NAS/home server and you don't need a lot of cpu/ram people use p4 era hardware. The lowest wattage I saw on a German user group about this was around 6W for an idling system. I myself am currently running a p4 era 1u server (a Fujitsu primergy rx100 s7) with a 4 core Xeon (2.4ghz or so), 4gb ram, google's edge TPU accelerator(dual edge tpu on pcie) and two 1tb spinning disks in a mirror on as a CCTV server(the tpu does object recognition). This box runs at 20%~90% cpu utilisation all the time and it draws 35W on average at the wall. It can peak at 75W or go down to 25W (it never really idles). This server (excluding the tpu) cost me under $100. And if I want I can replace the disks with bigger ones or add 2 more external drives as there are 2 unused sata ports. Also this server comes with remote management card so I can login anytime using a separate network port and do a power down, set temperature alerts etc, see power usage or access the console/bios. Good luck finding a similar option with similar features, low power consumption and price with modern hardware. Yes, I'm a fan of retro hw. I have a commodore 64, a 386sx, a win98 and winxp pcs. Some have only sentimental value, but not all old hw is impractical to use seriously today.

by dijit 3y ago

hakfoo 3y ago

> it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU I'd say that 250-350 watt PSUs were very common in white-box/home-built PCs in the P4/Athlon XP era. 400W and above, yes, that was much less common. I can recall at that point in time, Enermax made their name selling some of the largest PSUs on the mainstream market, and that line tended to be like 450-600W units. I do sort of agree, it's almost completely about GPUs these days. The spinning rust is now low-power flash. A top Ryzen 9 or Core i9 might top out at 150-250W, but that's not that much higher than Prescott on a bad day, and plenty of people are picking models in the <100 watt power classes. However, the idea of a 400W-by-itself GPU was completely off the field in the early 2000s.

userbinator 3y ago
I'd say that 250-350 watt PSUs were very common in white-box/home-built PCs in the P4/Athlon XP era. ...and the vast majority of those PSUs were cheap off-brand units actually rated in unrealistic "Chinese watts", with 150-200 being all they could honestly deliver for anything short of brief spikes.

Roark66 3y ago

>it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's Exactly that. I just had to upgrade my 850W psu to 1000W because I'm upgrading my gpu to an rtx 3090. This is why if you want the absolutely most power efficient NAS/home server and you don't need a lot of cpu/ram people use p4 era hardware. The lowest wattage I saw on a German user group about this was around 6W for an idling system. I myself am currently running a p4 era 1u server (a Fujitsu primergy rx100 s7) with a 4 core Xeon (2.4ghz or so), 4gb ram, google's edge TPU accelerator(dual edge tpu on pcie) and two 1tb spinning disks in a mirror on as a CCTV server(the tpu does object recognition). This box runs at 20%~90% cpu utilisation all the time and it draws 35W on average at the wall. It can peak at 75W or go down to 25W (it never really idles). This server (excluding the tpu) cost me under $100. And if I want I can replace the disks with bigger ones or add 2 more external drives as there are 2 unused sata ports. Also this server comes with remote management card so I can login anytime using a separate network port and do a power down, set temperature alerts etc, see power usage or access the console/bios. Good luck finding a similar option with similar features, low power consumption and price with modern hardware. Yes, I'm a fan of retro hw. I have a commodore 64, a 386sx, a win98 and winxp pcs. Some have only sentimental value, but not all old hw is impractical to use seriously today.