Yup. In my area, power usage is a non-issue. I pay $0.12-0.13/month, so my concerns around power usage are only because I don’t want to be wasteful (our energy largely comes from coal and natural gas). So I wouldn’t buy the A380 despite it not mattering too much because it’s just too wasteful.
This new set of cards seem to be a lot more power efficient though, so maybe they’re worth a look if you need something for transcoding.
I’ve just looked it up and the A380 seems to only draw ~17W at idle. That’s better than I thought, but still 2-3 times a HDD.
I wonder whether the new generation will lower the idle power usage too, or only the performance per watt.
Yeah, my NAS uses something like 50W (measured from the wall), with two HDDs, a SATA SSD, Ryzen 1700, and an old GPU (750 Ti, won’t boot without graphics). I haven’t measured everything independently, but online sources say 6W for the GPU. So the A380 would be 3x higher. That doesn’t matter too much in my area, but it’s still extra power draw.
Hopefully the new gen is close to that 6W figure.