Re:GeForce RTX 40 Series
by smoldesu on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @02:16PM
(#32915711)
I'll also add that Nvidia's drivers are fairly good at keeping wattages relatively low, at least for desktop cards. My 3070 will idle ~10 watts when decoding video or just accelerating my desktop environment. You only see that 300-watt TDP take effect when doing consecutive renders or local ML like Stable Diffusion, and you'll definitely want the extra power.
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The fan curves though kinda suck for the default nvidia drivers - especially on the blower it will run them super low to try to make it silent (which is not very efficient heat wise) and then not start spinning it up until it is really under load. Whereas there is a level that is barely an increase in perceptible noise that cools the GPU significantly more and for many mid range loads will not end up with with the GPU temp (and the fan) going through lots of highs and lows.