power consumption

Pleasantly surprised but here is some figures after feeding my PC via a UPS which can measure pwoer consumption.

Idle at desktop around 70-80 watts
Idle in game like game menu around 100 watts
Under load in game with about 50-70% GPU load at full turbo clocks around 130-180 watts.

Seems my 600 watt PSU is way overkill.

Hardware is a intel 4670k overclocked to 4.3ghz, it isnt allowed to go to idle clocks so when system is idle it still is at 3.4ghz not 800mhz, Nvidia gtx 1070 GPU.

Also those of us with PS4's I found out its prudent to not leave download enabled for standby, standby power usage is 10 watts without download mode, but 70 watts with download mode.

Its always good to have a bit extra in case you require something that requires more power than usual.

I'm also surprised it's not higher, that's good news though to know gaming isn't costing much in electric

How is it overkill?

You'll pull anything up to 190W from that cpu overclock, and you haven't mentioned the cooler TDP, the case fans etc. So a 65W cpu cooler will put you over 400W.

Under load, the 1070 pulls up to 150w at stock, and they recommend a 500W PSU.

A 600W sounds about right to me.

the power is for the entire unit, so includes fans, storage etc. also includes the overclocking.

the cpu power usage is not just the clock speed but actually mainly down to the vcore, my vcore is only 1.15v, I dont go to crazy levels like some people do

On paper yes the 600w is good, but in my usage pattern its overkill.

Bear in mind to draw the absolute max power is running things like prime95 and certian benchmark apps.

I only care about my own usage scenario and just surprised how little power I am using.

I'm waiting to see how Vega fairs at 4K before finalising my new build. I've been tempted to go for Zen to complement it, but I'm still indecisive. My 4690k has never been o/c'ed and it performs well enough processing video.

Now that power consumption issues aren't really a worry anymore, it makes the eight core sound like a better bet for future 4K video processing.

yeah, obviously I am aware I am only seeing averaged out power consumption on the UPS, and short spikes would be higher, so having a higher rated PSU is to ensure safety in those situations. was just surprised how low my average consumption was

zen is very nice, its only weakness in my view is the weak overclocking, there is an issue with the way they split the 8 cores into 2 sets of 4 cores as well, but I think thats fixable with scheduler optimisations. the lowest zen SKU doesnt have that second issue.

On IPC zen is roughly equal to broadwell, we both have haswell which I expect is slightly weaker on IPC vs zen, so in my case I have a 4.3ghz haswell, which might be equivalent to maybe a 4.2 or possibly even 4.1ghz zen chip. So if they ever release new models capable of hitting 4.1-4.2 clock speeds then it becomes a setup that shouldnt be weaker on games compared to existing setup and have additional cores for tasks that love having more cores like rendering.

Personally I got no real desire to play at 4k, I only use 1440p currently because I got the monitor to have more workspace on my desktop. A lot of people see 1440p as a good sweetspot, as it is nowhere near as demanding as 4k.

I want 4K for driving games, so hopefully 60fps shouldn't be an issue under Vega.

I want a new DDR4 ATX mobo anyway, so it's a difficult decision whether or not to go Zen. If I wasn't changing the mobo, I'd stick with the 4690k anyway.

I game on a TV and was hoping that Freesync would have started appearing on TVs by now; another reason I was going to skip the 1070 and wait for Vega. If there's still no news by the time Vega actually becomes readily available, a 1070 might be the most obvious choice instead. We'll have to wait and see the price tiers first.