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#1
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Lower Power Utilization for High End Video Card?
I have an older XP computer in a living room on which I installed an nVidia
GEForce 8800 Ultra. The card performs well, but to my disbelief with the monitor turned off and the computer doing nothing but displaying an inactive Windows desktop, the nVidia card is consuming about 160 watts of energy continuously. Since the system is only used to run a few virtual machines about 99% of the time, that is a lot of wasted energy. I want a card that can stop burning watts when it is in a low use mode. Does anyone make a top tier video card that can power itself to a minimum power utilization mode when the card is not being used heavily? I read somewhere that some newer version of AMD Eyefinity could get power utilization in an unused mode down under 20 watts. What are details on that? -- W |
#2
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Lower Power Utilization for High End Video Card?
W wrote:
I have an older XP computer in a living room on which I installed an nVidia GEForce 8800 Ultra. The card performs well, but to my disbelief with the monitor turned off and the computer doing nothing but displaying an inactive Windows desktop, the nVidia card is consuming about 160 watts of energy continuously. Since the system is only used to run a few virtual machines about 99% of the time, that is a lot of wasted energy. I want a card that can stop burning watts when it is in a low use mode. Does anyone make a top tier video card that can power itself to a minimum power utilization mode when the card is not being used heavily? I read somewhere that some newer version of AMD Eyefinity could get power utilization in an unused mode down under 20 watts. What are details on that? This is true of newer cards from either company. The ratio of 3D_max to Idle is improving. Your card could be 70W at idle (measured at the card), and newer cards have actually improved on that. Xbitlabs.com used to do per-rail power measurement, using a specially modified motherboard, but they've stopped doing that, and so we no longer have those measurements available for newer cards. All they do now is system power measurements, which are useless for determining the exact 3D_max to Idle ratio. (If they had a "system power with no video present" measurement, then, their measurements would have some value.) All I can tell you, is a newer card will *likely* be lower at idle. The 8800 is still back in the "bad" days. This is another one of those sites that only does system power. HD 7970 "system idle" 113W, "system 3D Max" 391W. So the idle is better there. Your card is around 70W idle, 131W max, which means ratio-wise, it doesn't do that well at idle. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/27 There was an era, when silicon gates were relatively leaky. Intel Prescott was an example of that, where 25% of DC power was just wasted as heat, and did nothing for you. While chips still leak, more development work has gone into making structures for gates, which don't leak quite as bad as that. (The geometry of the gates shrunk, and the gates and silicon structures had to be redesigned to prevent leakage from them rising worse than the Prescott era.) The other improvement comes from clock gating - where desktop cards are now closer to how mobile graphics work, in terms of clock gating. There's a good chance, that no matter what card you buy, it'll do better than your 70W idle 8800 family card. Paul |
#3
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Lower Power Utilization for High End Video Card?
Hey Paul... do you have a web site that may collect your learned answers? I
certainly get a lot from your explanations. T2 "Paul" wrote in message ... W wrote: I have an older XP computer in a living room on which I installed an nVidia GEForce 8800 Ultra. The card performs well, but to my disbelief with the monitor turned off and the computer doing nothing but displaying an inactive Windows desktop, the nVidia card is consuming about 160 watts of energy continuously. Since the system is only used to run a few virtual machines about 99% of the time, that is a lot of wasted energy. I want a card that can stop burning watts when it is in a low use mode. Does anyone make a top tier video card that can power itself to a minimum power utilization mode when the card is not being used heavily? I read somewhere that some newer version of AMD Eyefinity could get power utilization in an unused mode down under 20 watts. What are details on that? This is true of newer cards from either company. The ratio of 3D_max to Idle is improving. Your card could be 70W at idle (measured at the card), and newer cards have actually improved on that. Xbitlabs.com used to do per-rail power measurement, using a specially modified motherboard, but they've stopped doing that, and so we no longer have those measurements available for newer cards. All they do now is system power measurements, which are useless for determining the exact 3D_max to Idle ratio. (If they had a "system power with no video present" measurement, then, their measurements would have some value.) All I can tell you, is a newer card will *likely* be lower at idle. The 8800 is still back in the "bad" days. This is another one of those sites that only does system power. HD 7970 "system idle" 113W, "system 3D Max" 391W. So the idle is better there. Your card is around 70W idle, 131W max, which means ratio-wise, it doesn't do that well at idle. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/27 There was an era, when silicon gates were relatively leaky. Intel Prescott was an example of that, where 25% of DC power was just wasted as heat, and did nothing for you. While chips still leak, more development work has gone into making structures for gates, which don't leak quite as bad as that. (The geometry of the gates shrunk, and the gates and silicon structures had to be redesigned to prevent leakage from them rising worse than the Prescott era.) The other improvement comes from clock gating - where desktop cards are now closer to how mobile graphics work, in terms of clock gating. There's a good chance, that no matter what card you buy, it'll do better than your 70W idle 8800 family card. Paul |
#4
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Lower Power Utilization for High End Video Card?
"Paul" wrote in message
... W wrote: I have an older XP computer in a living room on which I installed an nVidia GEForce 8800 Ultra. The card performs well, but to my disbelief with the monitor turned off and the computer doing nothing but displaying an inactive Windows desktop, the nVidia card is consuming about 160 watts of energy continuously. Since the system is only used to run a few virtual machines about 99% of the time, that is a lot of wasted energy. I want a card that can stop burning watts when it is in a low use mode. Does anyone make a top tier video card that can power itself to a minimum power utilization mode when the card is not being used heavily? I read somewhere that some newer version of AMD Eyefinity could get power utilization in an unused mode down under 20 watts. What are details on that? This is true of newer cards from either company. The ratio of 3D_max to Idle is improving. Your card could be 70W at idle (measured at the card), and newer cards have actually improved on that. Xbitlabs.com used to do per-rail power measurement, using a specially modified motherboard, but they've stopped doing that, and so we no longer have those measurements available for newer cards. All they do now is system power measurements, which are useless for determining the exact 3D_max to Idle ratio. (If they had a "system power with no video present" measurement, then, their measurements would have some value.) All I can tell you, is a newer card will *likely* be lower at idle. The 8800 is still back in the "bad" days. This is another one of those sites that only does system power. HD 7970 "system idle" 113W, "system 3D Max" 391W. So the idle is better there. Your card is around 70W idle, 131W max, which means ratio-wise, it doesn't do that well at idle. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/27 There was an era, when silicon gates were relatively leaky. Intel Prescott was an example of that, where 25% of DC power was just wasted as heat, and did nothing for you. While chips still leak, more development work has gone into making structures for gates, which don't leak quite as bad as that. (The geometry of the gates shrunk, and the gates and silicon structures had to be redesigned to prevent leakage from them rising worse than the Prescott era.) The other improvement comes from clock gating - where desktop cards are now closer to how mobile graphics work, in terms of clock gating. There's a good chance, that no matter what card you buy, it'll do better than your 70W idle 8800 family card. It's not clear what the data you report means if it is a measurement of total power used by the system. You would have to subtract out the system power use when no video card is installed to get any kind of proxy for power used by the video card alone? This article: http://us.digitalversus.com/graphics...4621/test.html in the section named "Power Use" is suggesting that the ATI 7850 can go into an idle mode that uses 3 watts. Effectively the card turns itself off: "Better still, the excellent ZeroCore Power feature gives a 16% reduction in energy consumption at idle and allows you to turn the card's fan off. For this, the computer has to be configured so that it switches the screen off after a given period of time. As soon as the screen goes on standby, the card is almost entirely switched off and only consumes 3 watts of power, bringing the overall consumption of our test computer down to 74 watts." On my system, the nVidia 8800 Ultra is consuming 160 watts *just for the power card* and when the system is in idle state. 3 watts versus 160 watts is a huge difference? -- W |
#5
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Lower Power Utilization for High End Video Card?
Tom wrote:
Hey Paul... do you have a web site that may collect your learned answers? I certainly get a lot from your explanations. T2 Google Groups archives the contents of the news groups. Most of the info I gather, is "out there". It's available on enthusiast sites, where occasionally someone from the factory might mention some of this stuff. In cases like with Intel redesigning their silicon, there have been articles in the public domain about that. (Intel took a lot more chances during its evolution than AMD did. Intel turned their transistors "upside-down" for example, when they redid their smaller geometry processes. AMD has one tenth the staff, and can't afford that level of research.) I have experience at a silicon fab, but that's back in the days when leakage current was precisely "zero". So my experience doesn't count for anything. My old fab is gone now, and a drug company uses the building. Anything silicon related has long since been thrown away. This is the article I was looking for earlier, but couldn't find it again. Some per-rail power measurements from 2010. Some of the cards have pretty low power, like the HD 5450 at 3.2 watts (idle) and the Geforce 210 at 3.9 watts (idle). The problem now, is getting an article of this quality, in the year 2012. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/gra...0_3.html#sect0 The HD 5970 there, is 44 watts (idle) and 240.7 watts (3D_max). So that's like a factor of 5 between the two. (I don't count OCCT, as it's one of a few synthetic tests that I wouldn't normally run here. In fact, some graphics drivers have features to detect things like OCCT or Furmark, and detune things so the card doesn't get damaged.) http://www.generation-gpu.fr/UserImg...D5870/OCCT.jpg So if a person can stand the crappy performance of a low-end card (for gaming), their idle power is exceptionally low. Cards like my old 9800 Pro, might be around 35 watts by comparison. Your room isn't going to get very warm, with a 3.2 watt card. Paul |
#6
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Lower Power Utilization for High End Video Card?
W wrote:
"Paul" wrote in message ... W wrote: I have an older XP computer in a living room on which I installed an nVidia GEForce 8800 Ultra. The card performs well, but to my disbelief with the monitor turned off and the computer doing nothing but displaying an inactive Windows desktop, the nVidia card is consuming about 160 watts of energy continuously. Since the system is only used to run a few virtual machines about 99% of the time, that is a lot of wasted energy. I want a card that can stop burning watts when it is in a low use mode. Does anyone make a top tier video card that can power itself to a minimum power utilization mode when the card is not being used heavily? I read somewhere that some newer version of AMD Eyefinity could get power utilization in an unused mode down under 20 watts. What are details on that? This is true of newer cards from either company. The ratio of 3D_max to Idle is improving. Your card could be 70W at idle (measured at the card), and newer cards have actually improved on that. Xbitlabs.com used to do per-rail power measurement, using a specially modified motherboard, but they've stopped doing that, and so we no longer have those measurements available for newer cards. All they do now is system power measurements, which are useless for determining the exact 3D_max to Idle ratio. (If they had a "system power with no video present" measurement, then, their measurements would have some value.) All I can tell you, is a newer card will *likely* be lower at idle. The 8800 is still back in the "bad" days. This is another one of those sites that only does system power. HD 7970 "system idle" 113W, "system 3D Max" 391W. So the idle is better there. Your card is around 70W idle, 131W max, which means ratio-wise, it doesn't do that well at idle. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/27 There was an era, when silicon gates were relatively leaky. Intel Prescott was an example of that, where 25% of DC power was just wasted as heat, and did nothing for you. While chips still leak, more development work has gone into making structures for gates, which don't leak quite as bad as that. (The geometry of the gates shrunk, and the gates and silicon structures had to be redesigned to prevent leakage from them rising worse than the Prescott era.) The other improvement comes from clock gating - where desktop cards are now closer to how mobile graphics work, in terms of clock gating. There's a good chance, that no matter what card you buy, it'll do better than your 70W idle 8800 family card. It's not clear what the data you report means if it is a measurement of total power used by the system. You would have to subtract out the system power use when no video card is installed to get any kind of proxy for power used by the video card alone? This article: http://us.digitalversus.com/graphics...4621/test.html in the section named "Power Use" is suggesting that the ATI 7850 can go into an idle mode that uses 3 watts. Effectively the card turns itself off: "Better still, the excellent ZeroCore Power feature gives a 16% reduction in energy consumption at idle and allows you to turn the card's fan off. For this, the computer has to be configured so that it switches the screen off after a given period of time. As soon as the screen goes on standby, the card is almost entirely switched off and only consumes 3 watts of power, bringing the overall consumption of our test computer down to 74 watts." On my system, the nVidia 8800 Ultra is consuming 160 watts *just for the power card* and when the system is in idle state. 3 watts versus 160 watts is a huge difference? The Xbitlabs numbers for an 8800 non-Ultra were 70W idle and 131W busy. In these kinds of articles, as far as I know, the "Idle" power is with desktop still visible and the user has stopped pushing the mouse around. These are not system power numbers, these are video card only, measured with current shunt in 3.3V_slot, 12V_slot, 12V_PCIE#1 and 12V_PCIE#2 (if they exist). Xbitlabs have stopped doing it this way, because it looks like they got another motherboard, and aren't interested in fitting the shunts. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/gra...0_3.html#sect0 The idle power of the card varies with the card's processing power in those charts. The HD 5970 for example, is still 44.4W for the card. A low end card like the HD 5450 is 3.2W idle. Turning off the screen is good for servers, but for a desktop isn't the best choice. Mainly because a desktop is more interactive, and if you aren't using it, chances are you've used S3 sleep or S4 Hibernate. Paul |
#7
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Lower Power Utilization for High End Video Card?
"Paul" wrote in message
... W wrote: "Paul" wrote in message ... W wrote: I have an older XP computer in a living room on which I installed an nVidia GEForce 8800 Ultra. The card performs well, but to my disbelief with the monitor turned off and the computer doing nothing but displaying an inactive Windows desktop, the nVidia card is consuming about 160 watts of energy continuously. Since the system is only used to run a few virtual machines about 99% of the time, that is a lot of wasted energy. I want a card that can stop burning watts when it is in a low use mode. Does anyone make a top tier video card that can power itself to a minimum power utilization mode when the card is not being used heavily? I read somewhere that some newer version of AMD Eyefinity could get power utilization in an unused mode down under 20 watts. What are details on that? This is true of newer cards from either company. The ratio of 3D_max to Idle is improving. Your card could be 70W at idle (measured at the card), and newer cards have actually improved on that. Xbitlabs.com used to do per-rail power measurement, using a specially modified motherboard, but they've stopped doing that, and so we no longer have those measurements available for newer cards. All they do now is system power measurements, which are useless for determining the exact 3D_max to Idle ratio. (If they had a "system power with no video present" measurement, then, their measurements would have some value.) All I can tell you, is a newer card will *likely* be lower at idle. The 8800 is still back in the "bad" days. This is another one of those sites that only does system power. HD 7970 "system idle" 113W, "system 3D Max" 391W. So the idle is better there. Your card is around 70W idle, 131W max, which means ratio-wise, it doesn't do that well at idle. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/27 There was an era, when silicon gates were relatively leaky. Intel Prescott was an example of that, where 25% of DC power was just wasted as heat, and did nothing for you. While chips still leak, more development work has gone into making structures for gates, which don't leak quite as bad as that. (The geometry of the gates shrunk, and the gates and silicon structures had to be redesigned to prevent leakage from them rising worse than the Prescott era.) The other improvement comes from clock gating - where desktop cards are now closer to how mobile graphics work, in terms of clock gating. There's a good chance, that no matter what card you buy, it'll do better than your 70W idle 8800 family card. It's not clear what the data you report means if it is a measurement of total power used by the system. You would have to subtract out the system power use when no video card is installed to get any kind of proxy for power used by the video card alone? This article: http://us.digitalversus.com/graphics...4621/test.html in the section named "Power Use" is suggesting that the ATI 7850 can go into an idle mode that uses 3 watts. Effectively the card turns itself off: "Better still, the excellent ZeroCore Power feature gives a 16% reduction in energy consumption at idle and allows you to turn the card's fan off. For this, the computer has to be configured so that it switches the screen off after a given period of time. As soon as the screen goes on standby, the card is almost entirely switched off and only consumes 3 watts of power, bringing the overall consumption of our test computer down to 74 watts." On my system, the nVidia 8800 Ultra is consuming 160 watts *just for the power card* and when the system is in idle state. 3 watts versus 160 watts is a huge difference? The Xbitlabs numbers for an 8800 non-Ultra were 70W idle and 131W busy. In these kinds of articles, as far as I know, the "Idle" power is with desktop still visible and the user has stopped pushing the mouse around. These are not system power numbers, these are video card only, measured with current shunt in 3.3V_slot, 12V_slot, 12V_PCIE#1 and 12V_PCIE#2 (if they exist). Xbitlabs have stopped doing it this way, because it looks like they got another motherboard, and aren't interested in fitting the shunts. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/gra...0_3.html#sect0 The idle power of the card varies with the card's processing power in those charts. The HD 5970 for example, is still 44.4W for the card. A low end card like the HD 5450 is 3.2W idle. If I believe the AMD web site, the RADEON ZeroCore power technology will put the video card into a sleep state that uses less than 4 watts while the system is running with the screen off. Good or bad, my computer will act as a server and the system will not sleep. But the screen will be resting 99% of the time and during that rest time I want to minimize the power draw. What is the most powerful AMD video card that fully implements the ZeroCore technology today? Turning off the screen is good for servers, but for a desktop isn't the best choice. Mainly because a desktop is more interactive, and if you aren't using it, chances are you've used S3 sleep or S4 Hibernate. It is not that unusual for a computer to act like a server and run virtual machines in the background. In my case those run a home active directory and some other administrative servers. -- W |
#8
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Lower Power Utilization for High End Video Card?
"W" wrote in message
... "Paul" wrote in message ... W wrote: "Paul" wrote in message ... W wrote: I have an older XP computer in a living room on which I installed an nVidia GEForce 8800 Ultra. The card performs well, but to my disbelief with the monitor turned off and the computer doing nothing but displaying an inactive Windows desktop, the nVidia card is consuming about 160 watts of energy continuously. Since the system is only used to run a few virtual machines about 99% of the time, that is a lot of wasted energy. I want a card that can stop burning watts when it is in a low use mode. Does anyone make a top tier video card that can power itself to a minimum power utilization mode when the card is not being used heavily? I read somewhere that some newer version of AMD Eyefinity could get power utilization in an unused mode down under 20 watts. What are details on that? This is true of newer cards from either company. The ratio of 3D_max to Idle is improving. Your card could be 70W at idle (measured at the card), and newer cards have actually improved on that. Xbitlabs.com used to do per-rail power measurement, using a specially modified motherboard, but they've stopped doing that, and so we no longer have those measurements available for newer cards. All they do now is system power measurements, which are useless for determining the exact 3D_max to Idle ratio. (If they had a "system power with no video present" measurement, then, their measurements would have some value.) All I can tell you, is a newer card will *likely* be lower at idle. The 8800 is still back in the "bad" days. This is another one of those sites that only does system power. HD 7970 "system idle" 113W, "system 3D Max" 391W. So the idle is better there. Your card is around 70W idle, 131W max, which means ratio-wise, it doesn't do that well at idle. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/27 There was an era, when silicon gates were relatively leaky. Intel Prescott was an example of that, where 25% of DC power was just wasted as heat, and did nothing for you. While chips still leak, more development work has gone into making structures for gates, which don't leak quite as bad as that. (The geometry of the gates shrunk, and the gates and silicon structures had to be redesigned to prevent leakage from them rising worse than the Prescott era.) The other improvement comes from clock gating - where desktop cards are now closer to how mobile graphics work, in terms of clock gating. There's a good chance, that no matter what card you buy, it'll do better than your 70W idle 8800 family card. It's not clear what the data you report means if it is a measurement of total power used by the system. You would have to subtract out the system power use when no video card is installed to get any kind of proxy for power used by the video card alone? This article: http://us.digitalversus.com/graphics...4621/test.html in the section named "Power Use" is suggesting that the ATI 7850 can go into an idle mode that uses 3 watts. Effectively the card turns itself off: "Better still, the excellent ZeroCore Power feature gives a 16% reduction in energy consumption at idle and allows you to turn the card's fan off. For this, the computer has to be configured so that it switches the screen off after a given period of time. As soon as the screen goes on standby, the card is almost entirely switched off and only consumes 3 watts of power, bringing the overall consumption of our test computer down to 74 watts." On my system, the nVidia 8800 Ultra is consuming 160 watts *just for the power card* and when the system is in idle state. 3 watts versus 160 watts is a huge difference? The Xbitlabs numbers for an 8800 non-Ultra were 70W idle and 131W busy. In these kinds of articles, as far as I know, the "Idle" power is with desktop still visible and the user has stopped pushing the mouse around. These are not system power numbers, these are video card only, measured with current shunt in 3.3V_slot, 12V_slot, 12V_PCIE#1 and 12V_PCIE#2 (if they exist). Xbitlabs have stopped doing it this way, because it looks like they got another motherboard, and aren't interested in fitting the shunts. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/gra...0_3.html#sect0 The idle power of the card varies with the card's processing power in those charts. The HD 5970 for example, is still 44.4W for the card. A low end card like the HD 5450 is 3.2W idle. If I believe the AMD web site, the RADEON ZeroCore power technology will put the video card into a sleep state that uses less than 4 watts while the system is running with the screen off. Good or bad, my computer will act as a server and the system will not sleep. But the screen will be resting 99% of the time and during that rest time I want to minimize the power draw. What is the most powerful AMD video card that fully implements the ZeroCore technology today? Turning off the screen is good for servers, but for a desktop isn't the best choice. Mainly because a desktop is more interactive, and if you aren't using it, chances are you've used S3 sleep or S4 Hibernate. It is not that unusual for a computer to act like a server and run virtual machines in the background. In my case those run a home active directory and some other administrative servers. -- W On AMD's web page for the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition: http://www.amd.com/us/products/deskt...7970GHz.aspx#3 AMD ZeroCore Power technology* . Ultra-low idle power when the system's display is off . Efficient low power mode for desktop work . Secondary GPUs in an AMD CrossFireT technology configuration power down when unneeded * AMD PowerPlayT, AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power are technologies offered by certain AMD RadeonT products, which are designed to intelligently manage GPU power consumption in response to certain GPU load conditions. Not all products feature all technologies - check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities. It seems to be up to the add-in board partner whether or not they want to implement the feature. |
#9
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Lower Power Utilization for High End Video Card?
"Homer Jay Simpson" wrote in message
... "W" wrote in message ... "Paul" wrote in message ... W wrote: "Paul" wrote in message ... W wrote: I have an older XP computer in a living room on which I installed an nVidia GEForce 8800 Ultra. The card performs well, but to my disbelief with the monitor turned off and the computer doing nothing but displaying an inactive Windows desktop, the nVidia card is consuming about 160 watts of energy continuously. Since the system is only used to run a few virtual machines about 99% of the time, that is a lot of wasted energy. I want a card that can stop burning watts when it is in a low use mode. Does anyone make a top tier video card that can power itself to a minimum power utilization mode when the card is not being used heavily? I read somewhere that some newer version of AMD Eyefinity could get power utilization in an unused mode down under 20 watts. What are details on that? This is true of newer cards from either company. The ratio of 3D_max to Idle is improving. Your card could be 70W at idle (measured at the card), and newer cards have actually improved on that. Xbitlabs.com used to do per-rail power measurement, using a specially modified motherboard, but they've stopped doing that, and so we no longer have those measurements available for newer cards. All they do now is system power measurements, which are useless for determining the exact 3D_max to Idle ratio. (If they had a "system power with no video present" measurement, then, their measurements would have some value.) All I can tell you, is a newer card will *likely* be lower at idle. The 8800 is still back in the "bad" days. This is another one of those sites that only does system power. HD 7970 "system idle" 113W, "system 3D Max" 391W. So the idle is better there. Your card is around 70W idle, 131W max, which means ratio-wise, it doesn't do that well at idle. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/27 There was an era, when silicon gates were relatively leaky. Intel Prescott was an example of that, where 25% of DC power was just wasted as heat, and did nothing for you. While chips still leak, more development work has gone into making structures for gates, which don't leak quite as bad as that. (The geometry of the gates shrunk, and the gates and silicon structures had to be redesigned to prevent leakage from them rising worse than the Prescott era.) The other improvement comes from clock gating - where desktop cards are now closer to how mobile graphics work, in terms of clock gating. There's a good chance, that no matter what card you buy, it'll do better than your 70W idle 8800 family card. It's not clear what the data you report means if it is a measurement of total power used by the system. You would have to subtract out the system power use when no video card is installed to get any kind of proxy for power used by the video card alone? This article: http://us.digitalversus.com/graphics...4621/test.html in the section named "Power Use" is suggesting that the ATI 7850 can go into an idle mode that uses 3 watts. Effectively the card turns itself off: "Better still, the excellent ZeroCore Power feature gives a 16% reduction in energy consumption at idle and allows you to turn the card's fan off. For this, the computer has to be configured so that it switches the screen off after a given period of time. As soon as the screen goes on standby, the card is almost entirely switched off and only consumes 3 watts of power, bringing the overall consumption of our test computer down to 74 watts." On my system, the nVidia 8800 Ultra is consuming 160 watts *just for the power card* and when the system is in idle state. 3 watts versus 160 watts is a huge difference? The Xbitlabs numbers for an 8800 non-Ultra were 70W idle and 131W busy. In these kinds of articles, as far as I know, the "Idle" power is with desktop still visible and the user has stopped pushing the mouse around. These are not system power numbers, these are video card only, measured with current shunt in 3.3V_slot, 12V_slot, 12V_PCIE#1 and 12V_PCIE#2 (if they exist). Xbitlabs have stopped doing it this way, because it looks like they got another motherboard, and aren't interested in fitting the shunts. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/gra...0_3.html#sect0 The idle power of the card varies with the card's processing power in those charts. The HD 5970 for example, is still 44.4W for the card. A low end card like the HD 5450 is 3.2W idle. If I believe the AMD web site, the RADEON ZeroCore power technology will put the video card into a sleep state that uses less than 4 watts while the system is running with the screen off. Good or bad, my computer will act as a server and the system will not sleep. But the screen will be resting 99% of the time and during that rest time I want to minimize the power draw. What is the most powerful AMD video card that fully implements the ZeroCore technology today? Turning off the screen is good for servers, but for a desktop isn't the best choice. Mainly because a desktop is more interactive, and if you aren't using it, chances are you've used S3 sleep or S4 Hibernate. It is not that unusual for a computer to act like a server and run virtual machines in the background. In my case those run a home active directory and some other administrative servers. -- W On AMD's web page for the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition: http://www.amd.com/us/products/deskt...7970GHz.aspx#3 AMD ZeroCore Power technology* . Ultra-low idle power when the system's display is off . Efficient low power mode for desktop work . Secondary GPUs in an AMD CrossFireT technology configuration power down when unneeded * AMD PowerPlayT, AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power are technologies offered by certain AMD RadeonT products, which are designed to intelligently manage GPU power consumption in response to certain GPU load conditions. Not all products feature all technologies - check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities. It seems to be up to the add-in board partner whether or not they want to implement the feature. Right. Which leads back to my question: what is the most power AMD video card that fully implements the ZeroCore technology today? I want a card that is in the top 10% of performance and that uses under 4 watts when video is in idle. -- W |
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Lower Power Utilization for High End Video Card?
W wrote:
"Homer Jay Simpson" wrote in message ... It seems to be up to the add-in board partner whether or not they want to implement the feature. Right. Which leads back to my question: what is the most power AMD video card that fully implements the ZeroCore technology today? I want a card that is in the top 10% of performance and that uses under 4 watts when video is in idle. Most of the designs done out there, use information from a reference implementation. Video card designers, just don't run amok by themselves. They need lots of help. If you needed to turn off the core power, all you need is a core switching regulator, with a "zero volts" VID setting. As current video cards, send a VID code to the regulator. A zero setting, would be translated by the regulator, as a request to turn off. This was done years ago, on CPU VCore regulators, when the VID lines are in a floating state (goes off). So it would all depend, on whether the regulators used (like Volterra), support a feature like that. The rest of the support, comes from the design of the GPU itself (like, separate power planes for the appropriate subsystems, as it would be profitable to maintain some state information while in ZeroCore state - you need to drive the VID lines for example). No regular website is going to be measuring the ZeroCore condition. (And since Xbitlabs "got lazy", they'd have been the best technically equipped to do such work. But they don't have the motherboard any more.) I'd never heard of ZeroCore until you mentioned it. It requires the chip be split into pieces, such that the PCI Express portion remain running, while the core is powered down. (Otherwise, the user is going to see side-effects from hot-insertion-like behavior.) On a non-ZeroCore card, I would expect two regulators, one for core, one for memory and memory interface. Perhaps the PCI Express can draw power from the same one as the memory ? You'd probably want to maintain video card memory state (self-refresh) while in the ZeroCore condition, as otherwise, there's be a noticeable delay if the video card was flushed to system memory. This sounds like a question that only someone in tech support at ATI or Nvidia could answer, and would likely require consultation with engineering. ******** Using ZeroCore as a search term, I can see a user having problems with it. And the problems are visible with the 12.10 driver (that's like a month ago). http://devforums.amd.com/game/messag...hreadid=161791 "I called AMD and told him about my problem. He assured me they know about the ZeroCore problem and have been looking into it. The first thing he said to try is installing the 12.11 beta drivers. If the problem is still occuring then he wanted me to run msconfig and choose Selective Startup, unchecking both the Load Services and Load Startup options. If ZeroCore works then it means that either a Startup Service or Startup Application is causing ZeroCore to fail. He gave me a workaround, just turn off the monitor-sleep function, since that is the functionality that turns ZeroCore on. If that's disabled ZeroCore doesn't turn on, so it will just run at 20% until the whole system goes into hibernate mode. It have been doing that and just turning off the monitor with the power button since he said that ZeroCore is activated when the monitor is told to go to sleep by the O.S." That would be selecting S1 sleep state, as far as I know. But at least I got a link to an article on when it was introduced. It confirms my basic ideas on how you'd implement it (make an island out of core, leave some peripheral stuff powered). http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/11 HD 7970 was introduced a year ago (2011-12-22), according to this. You'd expect it as a feature on any ATI card more modern than that (unless a card is introduced using older silicon of course). http://www.gpureview.com/videocards.php The only practical way to watch ZeroCore, is with an external power meter. As expecting the card to answer probes while in the ZeroCore state, is expecting a lot. On lots of low power states on computer, like say C6, the mere act of probing the device, upsets the power state, and gives the wrong answer. It would take careful engineering of the ZeroCore feature, to ensure you could actually actively monitor the thing while it's drawing only 3 watts. Using external monitoring, removes all uncertainty. Hearing the fan spin, does *not* mean it is broken. Even at 3 watts dissipation, the fan might need to run occasionally. And it would be stupid to turn off the fan entirely, while in ZeroCore. The cooling system should be ready for action at any time, as temperatures permit. You don't want the GPU to overheat, in any circumstance. Hearing the fan, suggests something is still drawing power though. Paul |
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