From 2012 onwards GPU power bills up ?

[MIKX]

I'm curious . .. .

Since buying any of the "heavy" GPUS. . say from AMD HD 7950 / R9 280X up to 1080 etc. Are your
monthly electricity bills much higher ?

I realise that IDLE & under load conditions vary greatly.

I'm interested in hearing from gamers and non-gamers, video editors.

 

[jscipione]

I have found cpupk.com to be a good source of information on power usage of various components. The HD 7970 listed here http://www.cpupk.com/details/gpu/Radeon-HD-7970.html is listed as consuming 113W idle, 391W under load, with a TDP of 250W. That should give you a good idea of the kind of power consumption to expect. You can lookup specs of pretty much any other GPU or CPU on that site too.

I was concerned enough with the power usage of my Mac Pro that I purchased a cheap power meter on Amazon. With X5680 and HD 5770 I measured my Mac Pro 5,1 to consume 240W idle and 375W under load. I swapped out the 130W TDP X5680 CPU for a 60W TDP L5640 and now I'm down to comsuming 175W idle and 250W under load. I'm thinking of swapping out the HD 5770 for something newer but less power hungry too because I'm trying to strike a good balance between power and power consumption.

Apple has specs on the power consumption of all their Macs and the cylinder Mac Pro with dual D700s idles at 44W and CPU max 270W which is actually pretty amazing engineering. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201796

You're going to have to do some research but the data is all there. In my experience the difference on my power bill has been negligible. Get a power usage meter, lookup specs of components and try not to worry about it too much. Unless you are running the thing 24/7 never putting it to sleep the difference is negligible. I measured my Mac Pro to cost me $5.22 in electricity usage in April 2018 at 10¢/KWhr.

 

[h9826790]

My home's average daily electricity consumption is about 32kWh.

So, let's say the high power GPU use 100W then the low power GPU.

That means if we fully stress the GPU for whole 24 hours, than the high power GPU will use 2.4kWh more.

Which equivalent to ~$2.8 HKD in my case.

So if I stress the GPU for 24/7, which is about ~$84 HKD more (about $10 USD). I don't think it's really significant at all.

And this is the result of stressing the higher power GPU 24/7. For average users, the extra consumption will be way lower than that.

 

[velocityg4]

At idle a GTX 1080 consumes about 7W on average. Unless your KW prices are insane. The costs would be negligible. Probably as cheap or cheaper than the base card which came with any Mac Pro. Under load it's about 175W to 200W. If your doing work which requires a GPU. You're going to save money over any included card. Since it gets a lot more work done per watt than old cards. So, it can finish the task and return to idle faster.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-pascal,4572-10.html

 

[h9826790]

At idle a GTX 1080 consumes about 7W on average. Unless your KW prices are insane. The costs would be negligible. Probably as cheap or cheaper than the base card which came with any Mac Pro. Under load it's about 175W to 200W. If your doing work which requires a GPU. You're going to save money over any included card. Since it gets a lot more work done per watt than old cards. So, it can finish the task and return to idle faster.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-pascal,4572-10.html

I think OP means high performance / TDP card such as GTX 1080. And that's compared to the relatively lower TDP card, e.g. 1050.

 

[mattspace]

firing up an electric oven to cook a roast, boiling an electric kettle for a cup of tea, or toasting a slice of bread in a slot toaster is probably going to be the equivalent of a week or a month of your GPU. How much sleep would you lose over any of those?

 

[bsbeamer]

I went from GTX 680 (official Mac version) to GTX 1080 FE and noticed reduced power consumption under load and lower internal system temperatures. Switching from single CPU to dual CPU for daily usage recently had minimal impact on power consumption. Removing the last spinning HDD from the system several months ago also helped lower internal temperatures.

At startup, machine is 200-225 watts for 30-45 seconds, then kicks up to 300-475 watts for 10-20 seconds, then 275-350 watts for 20-30 seconds and hovers around there most of the time. It will get as low as 250 watts if not doing much with the machine for extended periods of time.

When just using the system for "normal" work without video rendering or heavy GPU taxing work, it's 250-325 watts on average. When taxing the GPU (and/or CPU), system will usually spike around 525 watts. I'm not watching the meter all day every day, but I suspect it does not ever get much higher than that.

System config at the moment: Dual 3.46 CPUs, 128GB RAM, GTX 1080 FE (with dual mini 6-pin to standard 8-pin power connector), all SATA bays filled with SSDs, Apricorn Velocity Solo X2, Apricorn Velocity Duo X2, USB 3 card.

 

[h9826790]

I went from GTX 680 (official Mac version) to GTX 1080 FE and noticed reduced power consumption under load and lower internal system temperatures. Switching from single CPU to dual CPU for daily usage recently had minimal impact on power consumption. Removing the last spinning HDD from the system several months ago also helped lower internal temperatures.

At startup, machine is 200-225 watts for 30-45 seconds, then kicks up to 300-475 watts for 10-20 seconds, then 275-350 watts for 20-30 seconds and hovers around there most of the time. It will get as low as 250 watts if not doing much with the machine for extended periods of time.

When just using the system for "normal" work without video rendering or heavy GPU taxing work, it's 250-325 watts on average. When taxing the GPU (and/or CPU), system will usually spike around 525 watts. I'm not watching the meter all day every day, but I suspect it does not ever get much higher than that.

System config at the moment: Dual 3.46 CPUs, 128GB RAM, GTX 1080 FE (with dual mini 6-pin to standard 8-pin power connector), all SATA bays filled with SSDs, Apricorn Velocity Solo X2, Apricorn Velocity Duo X2, USB 3 card.

The 1080 has lower TDP than the 680. That's expected.

I re-read the original post a few times. I really believe OP means "switch to higher TDP GPU", but not "higher performance GPU".