Hey!
I've been preoccupied with life stuff and ended up having to pay on taxes instead of getting a return like I was hoping for, so my projects are a little bit on-hold for the time being... I should be assembling something janky in either my S4 mini or my MC600 to tide me over until I can move things along more again.
The long-story-short inspiration for this post is I'm interested in living in a camper/camper conversion/'tiny home on wheels', but I'd like to be able to continue PC gaming...
Unfortunately, being conscientious about power consumption and still trying to achieve acceptable or better gaming performance don't exactly go hand-in-hand. There's not much information out there at all, actually. Usually "low end" parts get glossed over by reviewers (and stop showing up on charts) and "industrial" low-power parts are never run through gaming benchmarks with (the potential for) GPU bottlenecks removed.
I know cpubenchmark.com has its table for performance per watt, but it's not the most useful set of data. At least, not for someone looking to assemble a system... most of the parts that show up on there are mobile and/or soldered-on solutions and a lot of them are only on there because they literally use ~5W. It's not exactly a "proportionate" comparison when you're comparing a chip that uses 5W and a chip that uses 115W--but it is "fair." I also don't know or understand how multiple cores/threads factor into how chips are ranked on that site or even just that table. It's kind of an arbitrary number to me.
So, here are some questions I have:
As I mentioned earlier, my "fun fund" didn't get the windfall I was hoping it would from a tax return, so I'm not yet in a position to start testing chips and whatnot, but I'm very interested in generating and recording my own data out as best as I can.
Also, I don't yet have a realistic expectation for what is a feasible amount of power that can be stored in a camper's battery system. If you have any numbers that could help me roughly frame that it'd definitely be appreciated. But I can look into that on my own, I have and just don't remember.
Thanks!
I've been preoccupied with life stuff and ended up having to pay on taxes instead of getting a return like I was hoping for, so my projects are a little bit on-hold for the time being... I should be assembling something janky in either my S4 mini or my MC600 to tide me over until I can move things along more again.
The long-story-short inspiration for this post is I'm interested in living in a camper/camper conversion/'tiny home on wheels', but I'd like to be able to continue PC gaming...
Unfortunately, being conscientious about power consumption and still trying to achieve acceptable or better gaming performance don't exactly go hand-in-hand. There's not much information out there at all, actually. Usually "low end" parts get glossed over by reviewers (and stop showing up on charts) and "industrial" low-power parts are never run through gaming benchmarks with (the potential for) GPU bottlenecks removed.
I know cpubenchmark.com has its table for performance per watt, but it's not the most useful set of data. At least, not for someone looking to assemble a system... most of the parts that show up on there are mobile and/or soldered-on solutions and a lot of them are only on there because they literally use ~5W. It's not exactly a "proportionate" comparison when you're comparing a chip that uses 5W and a chip that uses 115W--but it is "fair." I also don't know or understand how multiple cores/threads factor into how chips are ranked on that site or even just that table. It's kind of an arbitrary number to me.
So, here are some questions I have:
- Are there any sources out there that see how parts do when they're undervolted/underclocked?
- Is it feasible to undervolt (and underclock) a desktop-grade CPU that's 65W or higher until it's using ~5W and is still stable? I understand speeds would definitely be gimped at this range, this is more of a theoretical question.
- Are GPUs able to be undervolted/underclocked similarly to CPUs? Has anyone documented what the scaling is 'normally' like?
- Would one expect a higher-end chip to perform better on lower voltage than a lower-end chip? What about a newer chip versus an older one? (However you can answer this would be helpful, even if it's contrasting numbers of cores/threads or comparing clock speeds or comparing architectures' differences.)
- I haven't fooled with memory overclocking much at all--
- Is there an appreciable increase in power draw when overclocking memory?
- I'm under the impression that overclocking your CPU makes it harder(?) to achieve stable overclocks on memory, does underclocking have the opposite effect?
- When overclocking memory, do heat spreaders or DIMM height (standard vs low-profile) matter for safe thermals? Would cooling be necessary in any particular case?
- Is there an appreciable difference in power consumption between 2.5" SATA SSDs, SD card-style storage, M.2 SATA, or M.2 PCIe NVME drives?
As I mentioned earlier, my "fun fund" didn't get the windfall I was hoping it would from a tax return, so I'm not yet in a position to start testing chips and whatnot, but I'm very interested in generating and recording my own data out as best as I can.
Also, I don't yet have a realistic expectation for what is a feasible amount of power that can be stored in a camper's battery system. If you have any numbers that could help me roughly frame that it'd definitely be appreciated. But I can look into that on my own, I have and just don't remember.
Thanks!