PC gaming has an efficiency problem

I wouldn’t blame you if you plug your ears every time there’s a “performance per watt” metric, or when AMD, Nvidia, and Intel start going on about the efficiency of their hardware. But efficiency is important in your gaming PC, and it’s a problem facing PC gaming as a whole.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming Check your inbox! Privacy Policy There’s a sweet spot along the curve where you’re getting the most amount of performance per watt you’re spending. That’s when your hardware is being the most efficient.

It’s a step in the right direction, but Intel, AMD, and Nvidia still want to show what their hardware is capable of at its peak — even if that means sacrificing efficiency in the process. If you need proof of that, look at the above Google Trends graph. From 2015 to now, you can see the interest in overclocking has slowly waned while the interest in undervolting has increased. If you extend this graph out to 2004 when Google started tracking search volume, you can see that the interest in overclocking has all but disappeared compared to two decades ago.

That power difference alone could account for a cheaper air cooler versus an all-in-one liquid cooler, as well as a noisy small-form-factor PC versus a quiet one. If you need an example of the power of undervolting, look at the video from Optimum on YouTube below. The YouTuber took the Ryzen 7 7700X from 135W to just 85W and dropped temperatures by close to 35 degrees Celsius — and that was without an ounce of performance lost.

Even if you don’t care about saving some money on your electric bill, there are plenty of reasons to want more efficient components. Maybe you can save some money with a smaller power supply for your PC, or opt for a less powerful but cheaper CPU cooler. There’s also the impact of heat and noise. If you’re like me and enjoy playing your games with speakers instead of headphones, you know how important noise is. And don’t get me started on heat — especially as we start to enter the summer.

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