Making a Low-profile gaming PC build that is energy efficient...

[Mystical Spork]

Like the titles says, I want to make a low-profile and energy efficient gaming PC build that isn't too big or flashy and doesn't use a lot of power because I don't want to pay extra for my energy bills, so it shouldn't go beyond a certain threshold of power usage from what's considered average for electronic devices, which means no super high-end graphics cards like an RTX 4090 but it should be somewhat future-proof.

I don't necessarily want an AMD graphics card because Nvidia offers more features and they look like they're better lasting compared to the former. So it's mainly Nvidia graphics cards with either AMD or Intel CPU with any other components being from decent and reputable brands.

I'm mainly posting this because I want some advice from the community here on what would be some good parts and if anybody else has experience with creating similar builds; for reference, I got my recommended build from this blog post here: https://hothardware.com/news/power-efficient-pc-build-guide-for-under-1500

If anyone else has any tips or recommendations, please be sure to give me a detailed guide on what would be the best choices.

[Philco7a]

ASRock motherboard. Xenon CPU. 2060 Super GPU.
That's what I built during Covid by buying used parts off of ebay dirt cheap.
It still works great today and looks like you could build it for a couple hundred bucks.

[r.linder]

For energy efficiency with decent performance per watt, the RTX 4060 is more or less as good as it's going to get for low profile systems

Depending on overall budget you could go for AM5 but AM4 is still good, either 7600 or 5600 depending on socket

[Mystical Spork]

Origineel geplaatst door Philco7a:

ASRock motherboard. Xenon CPU. 2060 Super GPU.
That's what I built during Covid by buying used parts off of ebay dirt cheap.
It still works great today and looks like you could build it for a couple hundred bucks.

I should mention budget isn't something I'm very concerned about. As long as it saves me dollar bills on the important stuff like electricity, which I mentioned, then that's what matters most to me.

[Philco7a]

You need a laptop.

[Mystical Spork]

Origineel geplaatst door Philco7a:

You need a laptop.

Already got one and it's 4gb of vram, so not that great.

[Tonepoet]

Eeh, Nvidia is often more efficient than A.M.D., but not by such a tremendous amount that you'e going to feel it significantly on a month to month basis. I did a cost/benefit analysis of an older RX 580 vs a newer RX 6500 and determined that with a 72 watt difference in power consumption you might spend $32 per year extra in operational costs. You basically have three years before the difference in price breaks even, and by that point in time you might be considering a system upgrade anyway.

The 7900XTX has a 355 watt T.D.P. and it's considered most comparable in perf. to the RTX 4080 on Nvidia's side of the stack. which has a 320 watt T.D.P. If 72 watts costs 32 extra per year, then 25 watts is going to cost you more like $10. per year. Even if we're hating on A.M.D. and saying the 7900xtx should be compared with a 4070 ti super, the 4070 ti super has a 285 watt T.D.P., so the power consumption differential is only 70 watts. An RX 6600 only has a T.D.P. of 132 watt T.D.P., whereas the RTX 4060 only saves 17 watts of power over that, but really the 4070 ti super is most omparable to the 7900 xt which has a 300 watt T.D.P. and might just be A.M.D's. most. It's just not a significant cost increase unless maybe you overspec. your system and run the card longer than is reasonable. You'll likely be spending more chasing after efficiency than you will save as a result.

The price difference between an RTX 4060 and an RX6600 is somewhere along the lines of $100, so you'd be ready to retire the Nvidia card before you ever reached cost parity on electrical savings. Maybe not so much the A.M.D. card because those have extra V.R.A.M., but the way I see it is that you'll save more money in the long run extending the use of a card by a year instead of upgrading a card simply because you finally exceeded the limits of the memory buffer.

But really if you want something small with a discrete graphics card I'd consider an asrock deskmeet X600[www.newegg.com]. For $208 you get a small 8 liter formfactor case, an AM5 motherboard and a 500 watt 80+ bronze power supply. I believe they're even preinstalled.

But I don't really want to spec. out the other components for it right now because also Lunar Lake launched on the third[www.tomshardware.com], and it might just be that a new laptop or mini P.C. with integrated graphics might be the way to go if power consumption is really going to be a concern.

I have to get an idea of how good that new I.G.P.U. is because you don't want to run discrete graphics where integrated graphics will do on a whole new system.