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Comment by Thaxll | Hacker News Reader

600W for a customer product, when will this stop, 10 years from now we'll get 1200w pc to play games...

True .. it’s crazy but what’s interesting is the 5090 core count is 2x that of the 5080 (of course these are rumored specs). So with the 5090 you’re getting 2 5080s in almost every sense: 2x the ram, 2x the cores, 2x the bandwidth for 150w more in draw (450 vs 600) or for only 1/3rd more wattage.

So if they don’t gimp it too much for AI/ML things it could be a beast.

I think it’ll cost north of 3k and given supplies and stuff retail will likely be closer to 4k+

10 years? Multiple vendors have 1600w PSUs on market right now.

What's more, you'll need an AC to play pc games. My home office room is ~6m2, and even the current 500w machine I have there can noticeably bump the temperatures under load.

That could be a very good thing, depending on which part of the planet you live.

For example, I'm in Scotland, and apart from one or two days, we've basically had a "year without a summer", with cooler than normal temps. ;)

> 10 years? Multiple vendors have 1600w PSUs on market right now

We're going to need dedicated electrical circuits soon

(USA) I guess I better call an electrician to install one of those huge 240v stove/clothes dryer outlets in my PC room so I can run a bigger PSU for my dual 5090s.

Why do you need 1600W PSU for 600W card?

The PSU also powers the motherboard (keep in mind all those power hungry USB-C PD peripherals), CPU, cooling (fans and AIO liquid cooling pumps), storage, and RAM. Furthermore, when building a PC one would keep some buffer of a few hundred watts in the event that one would want to down-the-road add another GPU (or two (particularly for ML work)) to spare PCIe slots of the motherboard, or simply future-proof the PC for future more-power-hungry GPUs.

As someone who had a 3090 because that's all I could get my hands on at the time, I would not recommend anyone consider the XX90 products. Leave those for the over-the-top, money is no object, "I'm just flexing on you" builds. XX80 should be considered the limit for people who are building a reasonable gaming PC.

I ended up switching to a 4080. It certainly doesn't sip power and is also quite expensive, but the difference is large enough that I don't feel anymore like I need to find a way to send the heat output directly outside during the summer.

Are you similarly frustrated that microwaves and coffee makers can easily take 1,200 Watts or more?

My guy, I’m not running a microwave or coffee maker for 2 to 3 hours or more at a time.

Nobody needs it. It's a luxury product. If you don't want a 600w GPU just get a different one. I only recently upgraded from the 1070 that's served me well for almost a decade. Didn't really notice much of a difference even though I splurged a bit.

Buying top end gpus these days seems to me like a total waste of money unless you have very specific needs. For playing any mainstream game at 1440p you'll be completely fine with a mid-tier previous-gen card.

Well think of it this way, why should gpu manufacturers only build for the lowest common denominator? If someone wants a 600W chip shouldn't they be able to get one?

On the other hand, game studios can obviously not design their games around such chips.

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