Hm, do they? I don't think any stationary PC I've had the past 15 years have idled that low. They have all had modest(ish) specs, and the setups were tuned for balanced power consumption rather than performance. My current one idles at 50-55W. There's a Ryzen 5 5600G and an Nvidia GTX 1650 in there. The rest of the components are unassuming in terms of a power consumption - a single NVMe SSD, a single 120mm fan running at half RPM, and 16 GiB of RAM (of course without RGB LED nonsense).

Series 16 cards have weird idle problems. Mine also exhibited that. They're literally Series 20s with no RTX cores at all, and their identical 20 counterparts didn't seem to have the same issue.

So, I assume its Nvidia incompetence. Its my first and last Nvidia card in years, AMD treats users better.

Are the 10- and 40- series similar? Before the 1650 I had the 1060 in the same PC, and for a while I had an RTX 4060 in it as well (which I bailed on because the model emitted terrible coil noise). Neither really made any mentionable difference in idle power. I'm personally convinced that besides "NUCs" and running on only a 25-35W AMD APU with no discrete graphics card, the days of low-power stationary PCs are long over.

10 was probably the last truly inefficient, but you shouldn't be having problems with a 40.

Shame you don't have it around anymore, because I'd say set your desktop to like, native res, 60hz, only have one monitor installed, 8 bit SDR not 10 bit SDR, and see if the power usage goes away.

Like, on a 9800x3D /w 7900XTX with my 4th monitor unplugged (to get under the maximum super-idle load for the GPU), I'm sub-50W idle.

I run at 1080p60 in 32-bit true color mode, aka 8-bit SDR in Windows' various settings panels. My plan is to revisit the RTX series in the future when there might be a decently performing model at or below 100 watts TDP.

Wonder whats going on in your system. Hard to give any more suggestions without having it in front of me, but as much as I shit on Nvidia, you should absolutely not be drawing that much at idle.

There are settings in the BIOS that can effect this, and sometimes certain manufacturers (Asus, mainly) screw with them because they're morons, so I wonder if you might be effected by it.

Just checked my gaming PC - 5700xt + rx9060 and it's idling comfortably at 39W with a single 120hz 1080p display. Dual monitors will probably cause higher idling wattage.

It isn't the number of monitors that cause the problem, but the total bandwidth used.

Depending on the generation, either equivalent to 4k 60hz or 4k 120hz kicks them out of idle. For my card, an RDNA3, its 4k 60hz; RDNA4 is 4k 120hz.

So, I have 4 1080p monitors... if they're all at 60hz, it properly idles. If my primary one is at 120hz, it crosses that line and is now at lowest active clockrate, so total system wattage is ~75W instead of ~50W.

I almost considered having my 9800x3D's IGPU service the trio of 60hz monitors, but its like an extra 10-15W to enable the media engine and run enough shader to run WDDM... where my 9800x3D can reach (but not cross) 80c on particularly well optimized code under a NH-D15 G2 LBC, I don't really want to throw another 15W at that.