Silicon Week: Making power pay: how AMD’s Polaris graphics cards could save gamers money

Silicon Week: Making power pay: how AMD's Polaris graphics cards could save gamers money

By Kane Fulton

Silicon Week: Making power pay: how AMD's Polaris graphics cards could save gamers money

Introduction

PC gaming isn’t cheap. First, you have to buy powerful hardware if you want to play the best PC games, then there’s the cost of AAA games themselves. As we all know, Steam sales only go so far.

Most people barely stop to think about the ongoing electricity cost of running a typical gaming PC, which, according to a 2015 report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, can consume as much power as three refrigerators in a single year.

AMD has doubled down on the energy efficiency of its GPUs and APUs in recent years. In 2014, it launched an initiative to reduce carbon emissions and improve energy efficiency of its A-Series APUs.

In its new Carbon Footprint Study, the company now claims that its Polaris-based Radeon RX 400 series (including the Radeon RX 480) can achieve up to 2.8 times the energy efficiency of its previous generation Radeon R9 390 GPU.

Level up

The suggestion, then, is that upgrading from AMD’s older card to one of its newer ones can save you a wad of cash. Approximately 888 kWh is saved per year by making the switch, according to AMD, which it translates to around $112/£85/AUS$147 over three …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components

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