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Oregon Coast Trail Over the next few weeks, I'm going to TRY to accurately measure my power consumption doing daily work tasks on my big tower PC, the Steam Deck, and the HP Dev One laptop. (Using a Kill-A-Watt P3).
ALSO? Gaming power consumption comparisons between my desktop PC & the Xbox Series X, both at 4K resolution.
I expect it will be an eye-opening experience and I'll never turn on my tower again.
This will undoubtedly branch off into all kinds of software testing too. YES, I'll record & share data...
I ran some power consumption tests on #Windows 11, measuring from the wall.
My system: Ryzen 9 3900X, Radeon RX 6800 XT, 32GB RAM.
1% CPU utilization (Idle): 67W
5% CPU + 10% GPU (Streaming with Plex): 130W
Dirt 5 Benchmark (4K, High Preset, Uncapped FPS): 431W
Dirt 5 Benchmark (4K, High Preset, 60FPS Cap): 355W
Dirt 5 Benchmark (1440p, High Preset, 60FPS) Cap) : 288W
The power savings gained JUST from capping FPS to 60 is more than 2x the total power of a #SteamDeck under heavy load.
Starting #Fedora 38 power consumption tests, and decided to see how much extra power gets consumed by simply switching refresh rate from 60Hz to 120Hz (as this demands more work from the #Radeon card).
[As a refresher, it's a tower PC w/ #AMD Ryzen 3900X + Radeon RX 6800 XT]
- 1% CPU utilization (idle) @ 60Hz: 67W (this is the same result as Windows 11, btw)
- 1% CPU utlilization (idle)@ 120Hz: 97W
So an extra 30W pulled from the wall just to double my desktop refresh rate. Is it worth it?
In the UK, at 8 hours of operation per day, that 120Hz refresh rate boost would only result in about £30 per year.
But that ecological footprint multiplied by millions of people? Well, that might truly suck. Especially when we add up all the other "quality of life" things we enjoy with modern desktop PCs.
(I don't know how to make these calculations, and maybe this is something that @be4foss or @baldpolnareffart would excel at?)
@killyourfm that's a really cool project! I started a small tool to gather this kind of data (https://github.com/lutris/hardmon) but it's for CPU and GPU only. What do you use to measure power consumption from the wall? I have some smart plug which might do the trick
@killyourfm would be worthy to note that your low (288W for Dirt 5 at 1440p) would pretty much be my high. I measured around 210W max from a 5700XT and 80W max from a Ryzen 5 2600. 4k gaming has a much heavier impact on power consumption than 120Hz gaming. I haven't tried 4k gaming, but with FSR and DLSS it may no longer be necessary to render at such high resolutions?
@mathieucomandon And now you have my brain working overtime.
What would the power savings of DLSS & FSR look like when applied to millions of games? Damn....
@killyourfm on some games they are already enabled by default. FSR is pretty much what makes a game like Dead island 2 playable on a Steam Deck. The whole portable gaming PC trend might help getting games that are less power hungry by default. On the other hand, I can't wait to see what UE5 games look like... That will step up the power hunger...