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Las Vegas' dystopia-sphere, powered by 150 Nvidia GPUs and drawing up to 28,000,000 watts, is both a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat | PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 32 points 2 years ago (9 children)

True, but 28 million watts really puts things in perspective when your average PSU is less than 1000w.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    That's true.

    average PSU is less than 1000w

    Unrelated but I wish it was easier to find lower-wattage PSUs. My local PC store doesn't have anything under 650W. I know modern GPUs use a lot of power, but not all PCs use a GPU! I have a home server where 400W would be more than enough, yet the smallest I could find was 550W, in stock from just one manufacturer (Be Quiet).

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I mean, it should be fine, just because the PSU can provide more watts doesn't mean the system is actually using that much power. I have an 800w PSU in my gaming rig, but its average load is only 240 - 320w during gaming (I've measured it by powering the system with a portable Ecoflow battery).

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    It runs fine, it's just less efficient.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Where are you getting this from? Intuition?

    I think the quiescent current and losses are less in a well engineered psu.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    This is verifiable in manufactures data sheets.

    Efficiency at less than 20% and greater than 80% loads isn't great relative to in between those ends.

    This is compounded by lower wattage PSUs being more limited with regard to features and benefits.

    If you end up with a 650w PSU and your system idles at 80 watts for the bulk of a working day you spend long periods of time in this less efficient window.

    We need to see some quality 300w to 600w designs come back onto the market.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Well, it depends on how much you're spending: 80 plus titanium units, for example, are 90% efficient at both ends of the spectrum, which is as good as a 80 plus gold unit at the ideal 50% load.

    Of course, they're expensive, and thus maybe not really the best solution since the wasted power is probably never going to add up to the cost of the better PSU, but there is enough of a demand for high and low load efficiency that it's a thing that you could go buy.

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