No modern PC should be pulling 500W all the time.
Idle power can be as low as 20-30W depending on the build.
You should also allow it to sleep, of course.
> My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.
Something is wrong. A 3090 should only pull about 20 Watts at idle: https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-review-... . You might have some process forcing it into full-speed 3D mode for some reason.
500W is a very high average power consumption. And my electricity is 0.13 USD/kWh, which is about half 0.25 CHF/kWh.
True average power is probably below 100W, for a total cost in the realm of 10 CHF or USD per month.
If you’re living in a colder state, you may have to subtract the costs of having lower heating costs.
Also, consuming more energy is bad and this rush to apologize lack of innovation in gpu and cpus weve seen in the last decade is ridiculous.
Where does it end? I'm okay with a 5000cc truck because airplanes and cruise ships are much worse?
If you don't want to drive a 5l truck, don't drive one, but 500W is not an average load, and if you have high electricity costs thats a you problem not an everyone else problem.
The largest parts of my electrical bill are distribution and overhead charges that don't change whether I use power or not. The marginal utility of the power vs the cost is quite reasonable.
Each of the last 4 generations of mid to high-end card from Nvidia has required more electricity than the last. By Nvidia's own admission, their future chips will get larger and hotter to some extent due to slow down in moore's law and future process nodes being harder to reach. The die size of the parts has also grown which does not help.
Its not a small trajectory either; 4 years ago the most power hungry consumer part from Nvidia was a 1080ti which would easily draw 250w under load. today that number is now 500w for the current 3090ti, and rumored to be 800-1000 for the 4xxx parts launching end of this year. A GPU often will sit at peak draw for hours at a time in games as they try to push as many FPS as possible.
A current gaming machine with recent components can easily exceed 500w constant load during gameplay, and this figure will rise again with the 4xxx parts.
The ONLY exception to this really is Apple devices, and even then its not clear we can compare an M1/M2 GPU to the fastest parts Nvidia offer.
The performance gains are non existent and largely driven by bigger and bigger chips on smaller nodes.
There is no innovation in gpu and x86 cpus space since a long time, that happens only on arm nowadays.
Oh boy, you should visit USA sometime. A 5 liter truck is the small one.
Who is running their computer at 500W 24/7 ?
Your example is in now representative of reality.
My power is some of the cheapest in the country and we pay ~13 cents/kWh. It's a little misleading though since my bill breaks out generation and distribution costs into separate line items. They are both billed per kWH though and add up to 13 cents.
I wasn't trying to be misleading though because the point is the basic charge does not increase with usage. So for each additional kWh we add to that it's only $0.089/kWh.
Have you run the calculation? It's worthwhile configuring suspend for PCs these days. My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.