We built a PC more efficient than a console!

sure most gaming pcs don't spit out plumes of smoke while they're running but all that power that your thousand watt power supply is sucking up has to come from somewhere and unless you're on solar wind or hydro chances are its fossil fuels so then what's an environmentally conscious gamer to do well thanks to see Sonic sponsoring this video we're gonna be taking a step back today from raw performance and seeing exactly how low we can take our power consumption while keeping our games running great [Music] before we can optimize for power efficiency we need to determine how much performance we feel like we need for gaming so basically to prevent ourselves from running quake3 on our as PI and declaring victory we're saying that our rig has to run a modern triple-a title at max ish settings 1080p 60fps so we're gonna use shadow of the Tomb Raider as our bar now strictly speaking most games don't need a 6 core CPU right now but we're setting the bar there for two reasons one even if a game doesn't utilize every core background processes still can and having extra cores to throw those on to makes a big difference if you're already at peak capacity and - we are definitely going to be at peak capacity with the clocks were gonna be running so then we've really only got a couple of choices here representing AMD is either the rise in 536 hundred or 3600 X and we're gonna opt for the X version here in hopes that it's higher silicon quality will allow us to under bolt it to a greater degree saving us a little bit of power then on the Intel side the obvious equivalent is the core i5 9600 KF a variant of the 9600 K that has its GPU fused off and at least in theory unpowered as the KF is a bin 2 CPU compared to the lower-end 9400 we should be able to get more stable performance at lower voltages on average although again it comes down to your luck in the silicon lottery you might think we'd go for the equivalent T series CPU but we couldn't find any we asked Intel about this and they said subscribe PewDiePie we informed them that that's a completely dead mean at this point and we ended up getting a much better answer second time around as it turns out there's nothing stopping retailers from selling their low-power T series chips but they're only available in OAM tray packaging which means large minimum order quantities and reduced warranty support so most apparently haven't bothered now will want to grab motherboards with as few extra bells and whistles as possible while still retaining decent power delivery so the mid-range B series offering for both teams fits the bill and since risin relies so heavily on memory speed for performance we're gonna grab a thirty two hundred megahertz Trident Z memory kit based on Samsung B die chips why such crazy fancy memory well we're gonna undervolt the snot out of it just like our cpu in the interest of saving a little bit of power so now we just take what we have drop the clocks and voltages and see what happens I guess we should probably assemble it first well yes we can't really drop the clocks and voltages unless we have yeah right now there's a long please it took a long time to dial in our clocks but in the end we were left with both cpus running at 2.3 gigahertz with voltages well under one volt our memory is running with timings as fast as we can manage with as low of voltage as possible now as an aside our AMD system actually managed a higher stable memory speed than our Intel system did then for good measure we dropped our PCI Express link speed back to Gen 2 for our GPU and Gen 1 for everything else in order to reduce the energy required for those devices as well any non-critical devices SATA controllers we aren't using Wi-Fi adapters things like that were disabled and secondary voltages were tweet where possible okay so how are we doing here well my drink is still cold LT t store calm but actually what I meant was the CPU testing Oh in terms of raw numbers our CPUs are about even under synthetic load with AMD pulling a couple of extra watts but Intel definitively idles lower neither CPU idles as low as it could since I ended up needing to set a static voltage for stability but overall it seemed like a worthwhile trade-off right because we're gaming not using our PC as a glorified digital picture frame so then AMD's more watts so we're going in Tilden right not quite see our Intel bench here is having a little bit of trouble with frame pacing even with vsync and able to cap the frame rate our AMD bench didn't do that and since they're both so similar in power draw these frequencies already bumping up the core i5s core clocks to fix that makes it actually draw more power under load in spite of its instructions per clock advantage over Eisen I even tried comparing to the standard 9600 K and it's the same story though the KF does a lot a lot lower if that matters at all interesting so I guess that means we're going a and B then also I couldn't help noticing that you are not using a fan on our cooler here how this thing is barely even warm yeah on our rising bench it actually didn't even break 50 degrees on open air and I think that's probably thanks to its bigger soldered IHS oh right actually that reminds me we're doing a video about a really neat new cooler called a thermo siphon so make sure you guys are subscribed if you want to see how far we can go with that anyway so we've got our CPU figure it out what about our graphics card surely we're not gonna stick with a 20 atti here well I started with an RT X 20 atti just to eliminate any bottlenecks well as testing the CPUs and I've got it under bolted as far as it'll go but I suspect an RT X 2060 might actually be better for this with its comparatively simple core layout or maybe even rx 5700 well there's only one way for us to find out for sure dialing in the GPU was both easier and more difficult than you might at first expect yes the tools are easy enough to use but there's no clean way to adjust the voltage for a frequency just the other way around but using this to our advantage we managed to trick our cards into capping out at a given frequency and from there it was a matter of figuring out which voltage was both stable and most efficient to use I guess team red still has some work to do here power consumption was good but performance and thermals definitely were not so out goes the RX 5700 oh don't worry I'll keep you safe from the Nvidia she'll put you over here oh speaking of which I see that you actually turned off the cards lighting and the fans are off presumably that's to save some power but how did you stop the fans founders additions don't have a zero rpm mode I'm glad you asked I flashed the BIOS and I was scripted by the way that was scripted by the way I flashed the BIOS on our card with an EVGA one so it could be sent to run at zero rpm I set the software fan curb to cutting around the 80 degree mark and it only really ramps up and around 85 which it never hits on our open-air bench we're gonna have a link by the way to how you can do that in the video description yeah and as for the r-tx 20 80 vs 20 60 vs 20 80 TI no matter what I did I found that around 700 millivolts was the floor so with that in mind I think the results are pretty clear given that the 20 60 hits are 60 FPS target we can't justify the bigger GPU unless we're willing to spend 40 watts of our power budget on our TX or real time ray tracing so now we're ready to actually build this thing and see how it runs do we even need to do that well we don't necessarily need to I just figured it would be okay yeah let's do that while putting our build together we didn't connect our case LEDs in order to save on that little bit of energy that they require and we also decided to only connect the exhaust fan since honestly we didn't need much if any additional airflow you chose our power supply for a number of reasons and not just because see Sonic is sponsoring this video the biggest one is that as a titanium unit the efficiency of this power supply never drops below 90% under any circumstances period that means no matter how low we go we're only looking at 10% wastage at worst and that best here on 115 volt mains in North America it reaches nearly 95% efficiency just as importantly we need a power supply capable of a rock stable power delivery for how low our voltages are any appreciable amount of ripple or poor regulation even if it's in spec could cause momentary voltage droops that could render our machine unstable or otherwise require us to bump the voltages up to compensate similarly to how we chose a bin CPU and GPU we need a high-end PSU to make things reliable in the interests of efficiency at any cost we could have shortened the PSU cables as far as they'd go but the energy savings is to put it gently quite difficult to quantify so this is cool one side effect of having an extremely power efficient PC is that you also end up with an extremely quiet PC me the entire thing is not consuming much energy so there's not a lot of ways to eat to get rid of so this is great we are right around 30 watts at idle sometimes it jumps up to 31 sometimes it dips down to 29 28 but that is really freaking impressive to put that in perspective I mean compared to the incandescent light bulbs that we used to use in our homes that is less than a pretty dim 50 watt bulb while the computer is sitting not doing anything but of course our real test here is while gaming so let's fire up shadow the Tomb Raider and see how we're doing one thing you might notice despite the fact that this is a 4k monitor and it's capable of 144 Hertz we're currently running at 4k 60 and it's also capable of HDR that's off enabling high refresh rate or HDR increases our power drop by about 5 watts each we don't have the monitor plugged into that no but it increases the power draw on the GPU I did not know that yeah I didn't either until I looked it up well rush rate obviously because you're pumping out more frames but I didn't know that HDR had such a processing drop yeah and me neither fascinating you wouldn't think so so to give our system the opportunity to draw as much power as possible we've gone ahead and run it for about 10 minutes in game here to allow our GPU fans to ramp up so what we're gonna see then is we've got a peak gaming power draw of about a hundred and six to a hundred and eight watts which again to put this in the context of the technology of yesteryear when you bought a bright bulb for a large room it was typically like a hundred watt bulb so our entire gaming system here is drawing about as much power as a light bulb from when I was a kid so that's a fun fact but it doesn't give us any context for how this solution compares to other gaming systems so we're gonna go ahead and fire up an Xbox 1x also playing shadow of the Tomb Raider at 60fps and see how that compares so we can't guarantee our game is running at exactly the same graphical fidelity here because we don't have the same fine control on console but what we can set is the frame rate and the resolution so we're running at 60fps 1080p high frame rate just say 60fps so by comparison our modern console is anywhere from 130 to 145 Watts depending on what's on screen now to be clear we're not exactly declaring victory for the PC master-race here that's actually really impressive but that's of course one of the benefits of having something that is fully integrated and there is a bit of a cost advantage on the console side as well we were just wanting to provide you guys with the context if you're willing to spend the money and spend the time you can get a more efficient gaming experience on PC than you can even on a fully boxed and custom-designed game console so thanks for watching guys even if you don't care about having the most efficient gaming PC hopefully you picked up a couple tips and tricks here because aside from saving power tuning your PC and choosing the right components the way that we did today can also help you save some heat output during the summer which can be pretty frickin nice and some noise because the more efficiently your system is running the less fan noise you have to deal with massive thanks to see sonic for sponsoring this video we've actually wanted to do it for quite some time and if you guys are looking for another video to watch maybe watch the polar opposite of this one yeah yeah we're we overclocked an 11-year old PC that's basically kind of like the muscle car of of computing from back over a decade ago that was not power efficient at all let that link below

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,602,986

Rating: 4.9196072 out of 5

Keywords: gaming, PC, build, power, efficient, wattage, psu, seasonic, amd, ryzen, intel, core, undervolting, underclocking, 1080p, 60fps, sponsored, RTX 2060, GeForce, Nvidia, Ryzen 5 3600X, B450, Core i5 9600KF

Id: -d8gcfbjoZM

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/BruceWayneofLosSanto]

I don't know why you wouldn't set max ppt to 25w? Could still run decent boost then my 2600 can still hit 3.9ghz@25ppt. And to reduce idle power you need to underclock your ram to 2400mhz or so then the soc will be underclocked and you could've undervolted it as well.

[u/GLynx]

Other than 9900K(S), choosing Intel cpu for gaming is just dumb.

[u/Liddo-kun]

I think the Intel CPU couldn't keep FPS at a constant rate because it lacks multi-threading.

[u/AutoAltRef6]

Zen 2 seems to be quite efficient in a low power envelope, so mobile parts should be pretty good. As long as they fix things so it doesn't idle at 50+% of the power limit.

(lttstoredotcom)

[u/Wise_Devil297]

"Intel has an IPC advantage over Ryzen"

Is that right?

[u/Tizaki]

Very relevant to /r/greengamers

[u/Quantillion]

I'm actually intrigued by low power computing. We've come such a long way that low end stuff can do amazing things.

In a way I kind of wish they'd sell more laptop-internals in bigger formfactors like NUC's. You get the low power of mobile chipsets, but the heat dissipation and therefore no/less throttling than in a laptop.

Say for the sake of argument that you could buy a ROG Zephyrus in a larger form factor. Max Q graphics, mobile lower wattage CPU, but with good fans. You wouldn't choose it for ultimate performance, but it'd be an interesting choice for those looking for a more silent and compact gaming setup I'd think.

[u/toresimonsen]

Maybe they could do a video to track the resurgence of AMD as it corresponds to PPW improvements.

I'm also interested in seeing a video discussing the impacts of consumer displacement, re: 3900 (non-x) and the personal difficulty of maximizing efficiencies from a consumer perspective when B2B relationships undermine personal agency.

[u/TheAtrocityArchive]

4k 60 fps vs 1080p 60 fps......