 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 it's fossil fuels. So then what's an environmentally conscious gamer to do? Well, thanks to Seasonic 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. 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 Quake 3 on a Raspi and declaring victory, we're saying that our rig has to run a modern AAA title at max-ish settings, 1080p, 60 FPS. So we're gonna use Shadow of the Tomb Raider as our bar. Now, strictly speaking, most games don't need a six 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 onto makes a big difference if you're already at peak capacity. And two, we are definitely going to be at peak capacity with the clocks we're gonna be running. So then we've really only got a couple of choices here. Representing AMD is either the Ryzen 5 3600 or 3600X, and we're gonna opt for the X version here in hopes that its higher silicon quality will allow us to undervolt it to a greater degree, saving us a little bit of power. Then on the Intel side, the obvious equivalent is the Core i5 9600KF, a variant of the 9600K that has its GPU fused off, and at least in theory, unpowered. As the KF is a binned 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 to PewDiePie. We informed them that that's a completely dead meme 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 OEM tray packaging, which means large minimum order quantities and reduced warranty support. So most apparently haven't bothered. Now we'll 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 here. And since Ryzen relies so heavily on memory speed for performance, we're going to grab a 3200 megahertz Trident Z memory kit based on Samsung B-die chips. Why such crazy fancy memory? Well, we're going to 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 there. One moment, 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 a 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 two for our GPU and gen one 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 tweaked where possible. Okay, so how are we doing here? Well, my drink is still cold. Lttstore.com. 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 idols lower. Neither CPU idols 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 Intel then, right? Not quite. See, our Intel bench here is having a little bit of trouble with frame pacing, even with vSync enabled 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 i5's core clocks to fix that makes it actually draw more power under load in spite of its instructions per clock advantage over Ryzen. I even tried comparing to the standard 9600K 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 AMD then. Also, I couldn't help noticing that you are not using a fan on our cooler here. Wow, this thing is barely even warm. Yeah, on our Ryzen 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 thermosiphon. So make sure you guys are subscribed if you wanna see how far we can go with that. Anyway, so we've got our CPU, figured out. What about our graphics card? Surely we're not gonna stick with a 2080Ti here. Well, I started with an RTX 2080Ti just to eliminate any bottlenecks while I was testing the CPUs. And I've got it undervolted as far as it'll go, but I suspect an RTX 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. Ouch. Don't worry, I'll keep you safe from the Nvidia shill. I'll put you over here. Oh, speaking of which, I see that you actually turned off the card's lighting and the fans are off. Presumably that's to save some power, but how did you stop the fans? Founder's Editions don't have a zero RPM mode. I'm glad you asked. I flashed the BIOS on our- That 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 curve to cut in around the 80 degree mark and it only really ramps up at 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 RTX 2080 versus 2060 versus 2080 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 2060 hits our 60 FPS target, we can't justify the bigger GPU unless we're willing to spend 40 watts of our power budget on RTX 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 fun. 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. We chose our power supply for a number of reasons. And not just because Seasonic 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 at 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 binned CPU and GPU, we need a high-end PSU to make things reliable. In the interest 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 because the entire thing is not consuming much energy. So there's not a lot of waste heat 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 of 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 draw by about five watts each. We don't have the monitor plugged into the- 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, until I tried it. I mean, high refresh rate, obviously, because you're pumping out more frames, but I didn't know that HDR had such a processing draw. Yeah, me neither. Fascinating. Yeah, 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 106 to 108 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 One X, also playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 60 FPS 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 a console, but what we can set is the frame rate and the resolution. So we're running at 60 FPS, 1080P. High frame rate. Just say 60 FPS. 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 in 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 freaking nice and some noise because the more efficiently your system is running, the less fan noise you have to deal with. Massive thanks to Seasonic 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, where we overclock an 11 year old PC. That's basically kind of like the muscle car of computing from back over a decade ago. That was not power efficient at all. I'll put that link below.