With the release of Intel's Core Duo and Core Duo 2 chips, it's finally happened-- mainstream video card GPUs are about to overtake CPUs as the largest consumers of power inside your PC.
Interesting how things are changing. Why doesn’t the Geforce 7950 GX2 have anything other than Peak3D?
The fan on my graphics card is currently broken, so it whirs when you turn it on. I have to take down the side of the case (to which it is attatched) so it is horizontal, turn the PC on and slowly raise the case, hoping I don’t knock the fan too hard to set it off buzzing again. It’s great fun.
I Hate Fans. We need something more powerfull, less noisy. Instead of passive coolers with water, there should be a Gas-Like solution (kind of a refrigerator). Freon anyone? 
The problem would be that the valve and the compressor would cause “noise”, but… more than the fans?
It’s a bit trickier that just passive heatsink (it’s a watercooling kit), but it has 0 fan (just a low-power pump) and neatly cools your CPU, your GPU and your northbridge (if you need) at the same time, with virtually no noise.
I’m done with watercooling. I ran a Koolance system for about 2 years and the cooling solution got gunked up in a year each time. That, despite using pre-mixed solutions based on distilled water with Koolance anti-bacterial additives. And when the water gets gunked up in a water cooling system, you have to tear down the entire system to bare metal, drain it, and put it back together.
Water cooling just too complex and error-prone. Never again…
Plus, you can get near-silent water cooling performance from high end heatpipe air cooling. Water cooling is really only of interest for extreme overclockers these days.
We’re doing something wrong if we’re worrying about the noise and power consumption caused by software whose intended use is when the machine is idle.
I picked up a 7600GT recently, thanks to the power of mail-in rebates.
The one I have does have a fan, which kicks in after a while of playing any hefty 3D games. But the fan is slightly quieter than the fans already in my Dell 8400, so it doesn’t bother me as much as it might.
That’s why I really care about Core 2 Duo: less power = less heat = possibly less fan noise.
As far as the “extra 100W” goes, it’s a matter of your PC maybe not having a big enough power supply to take a newer card. My Dell has a 350W, which is the minimum recommended for this video card. Any bigger card and I would have had to swap out the power supply, which just ain’t worth it to me.
A lot of the “what might be coming” news on DX10 compatible cards suggests (jokingly?) that outboard power might be coming to the high end: you’ll have to separately plug your videocard into the wall instead of drawing from the PC’s supply.
Now that’s just wrong.
Martin, Peltiers, freon compressors, water blocks, and other alternative methods all require fans at some point to dissipate the heat they remove (and the extra heat they generate). (And peltiers are the only ones without even more moving parts; compressor systems I’ve seen are as loud as a real refrigerator.)
7000 series cards are just amazing if you care at all about noise levels. Not just their efficiency, but most ATI OEMs use extra noisy fans for no good reason at all.
Jeff, if you’re interrested in silent cooling for a desktop computer, I suggest that you check Zalman’s Reserator 1 Plus. It’s a bit trickier that just passive heatsink (it’s a watercooling kit), but it has 0 fan (just a low-power pump) and neatly cools your CPU, your GPU and your northbridge (if you need) at the same time, with virtually no noise.
Other than that, there are quite a lot of non-stock passive GPU cooling solutions, or even active low-noise solutions (the stock fan on 7900GTX cards, for example, is nothing short of amazing for stock cooling, it’s regulated and the fan is huge for a graphic card – 92mm – resulting in very low noise), check SilentPCReview, they have quite a few tests of active coolers.
Why in the world would you care about 100 watts? Surely there is some other room where you can turn off a light bulb in
order to free up the massive power your GPU is drawing.
The issue is not the power consumption, it’s that most of this power is immediatly transformed into thermal power that you have to dissipate (unless you want your computer to overheat and either throttle or crash). And the more heat you have to dissipate the more air you have to move into your case, the faster your fans have to rotate, the more noise your computer produces.
Of course power consumption doesn’t help either, the more power your computer needs the better your PSU has to be (both performance and quality-wise). Oh, and the more heat it’ll produce, therefore the more noisy it’ll be too (unless you get a good, efficient, silent PSU, a Seasonic S12 for example)
Martin, Peltiers, freon compressors, water blocks,
and other alternative methods all require fans at some point to dissipate the heat they remove
Yes and no:
Now of course the best systems are the ones which don’t generate noise at all, such as a well cooler (some guy had an in-house well with water at ~14C all year long, he put a big heatsink in the well and a powerful pump in his cave… quite impressive)
Here’s a little blurb on the power requirements of upcoming DX10 video cards:
ATI and NVIDIA have been briefing power supply manufacturers in Taiwan recently about what to expect for next year’s R600 and G80 GPUs. Both GPUs will be introduced in late 2006 or early 2007, and while we don’t know the specifications of the new cores we do know that they will be extremely power hungry. The new GPUs will range in power consumption from 130W up to 300W per card. ATI and NVIDIA won’t confirm or deny our findings and we are receiving conflicting information as to the exact specifications of these new GPUs, but the one thing is for sure is that the power requirements are steep.
Power supply makers are being briefed now in order to make sure that the power supplies they are shipping by the end of this year are up to par with the high end GPU requirements for late 2006/early 2007. You will see both higher wattage PSUs (1000 - 1200W) as well as secondary units specifically for graphics cards. One configuration we’ve seen is a standard PSU mounted in your case for your motherboard, CPU and drives, running alongside a secondary PSU installed in a 5.25” drive bay. The secondary PSU would then be used to power your graphics cards.
I think 300w is a stretch and must be referring to SLI or multi-card configs. I can easily see a single card using 130-150w however; just extrapolate from the graphs in my post…
My work PC has a passively cooled GeForce 6600
That’s what I’m using when we are playing BF2 (settings dialed down a bit). I want a better card, but I can’t can’t bring myself to spend the cash.
The power consumption issue is a real pain when you’re talking about a 24x7 PC like a Media Center. My current Media Center based on a Northwood P4-2.53GHz and GeForce 6200 uses about 100W when idle, which translates into roughly $10/month in electricity to keep the thing running. IMO, that’s too much when you consider that a set-top PVR would use about 1/25th of that.
Next time I go in and upgrade that system, a Core 2 Duo CPU + 7300GS looks attractive. Idle power consumption will be the main consideration. I don’t think “bang per watt” matters that much in this scenario; a dedicated Media Center is idle most of the time, and all of the GPUs in the XBitLabs list will “do Vista”.
I feel sorry for anyone running a Media Center with a high-powered video card and a Prescott P4 
I have a Prescott P4 in my desktop system, and the system almost overheated a couple of times this summer during the hot days.
That’s what I’m using when we are playing BF2
The 7600gt is 3x faster than a 6600 and it only costs $150.
The power consumption issue is a real pain when you’re talking about a 24x7 PC like a Media Center.
That’s why I built my media center PC around a Dothan Pentium-M and a Radeon 9600 video card:
Since that post, I have removed the wireless card and switched to a wired gigabit connection. It consumes ~60w at idle.
Great Article! Its usually pretty difficult to find out information about the heat usage of video cards. Its an important subject that so few reviewers are willing to touch.
what are a GPU and a PVR?
GPU = “brains” or CPU of a video card
PVR = Personal Video Recorder (Tivo, Windows Media Center, ReplayTV, MythTV)
is there a possibillity that this list gets updates with new cards ?
Idle power consumption is the most important metric from a power-savings POV. I read in an article on silentpcreview.com IIRC that most computers are idle 90% of the time they’re on. screensavers: Just make sure DPMS standby/off kicks in soon, and that the screensaver stops running while the monitor’s off. For many things you use a computer for, it’s essentially idling all the time. (e.g. web, email, downloading.)
So esp. if you leave your machine on 24x7, think about efficiency and do your part for the planet. (and yeah, get compact fluorescent lights, and all that, too!)
Now that AMD’s and Intel’s desktop CPUs both support slower clock speeds at idle, that should help, too. Cranking up to high power when under load isn’t a big deal, and is just a cooling problem.
BTW, I set my machine up to run at idle CPU speed while running SETI@home or Folding@Home, and only jump up to higher speeds in response to loads from higher priority processes. I don’t know what the power consumption of an Athlon64 under load at 1.0GHz is, though.
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Peter
I was searching the net for the most power efficient graphics card and happily noticed it was already in my PC!!! (the 7600GT)
why was I searching on power consumption?
Well… I’m building a home with wheels, most of the functions (like door opening, rear view, sound system) are to be Bluetooth voice operated via my pc to be housed in dashboard, meaning I need a damn good PC and very low power consumption so as no to drain the battery.
I’ve actually managed to get my pc running under 200W mark and still have 2TB raid, 4GB Ram, 7600GT and X-fi.
And in glorified response to previous posts…
Why in the world would you care about 100 watts? Surely there is some other room where you can turn off a light bulb in order to free up the massive power your GPU is drawing.
We’re doing something wrong if we’re worrying about the noise and power consumption caused by software whose intended use is when the machine is idle.
Not only are lower power products good for the transport industry and can generate billions of sales. But they also save the planet…!
if any can answer, why does my X800 make noises while running 3D programs like, weird sorta noise, not louder fan noise just a weird other one…doesnt happen when i am on desktop only when running 3D THINGS
Hope to see the comparison of the newer GeForce 8000 series card soon.