What seems like the most energy-efficient path?

Hey!

So, something I’ve been kind of nerdy about lately is system power consumption. I’d really like to–as much as I can–live off of renewable energy. But I also grew up as a PC gamer and can appreciate that sweet 120Hz+ gaming at high resolution, and occasionally do need to do heavier workloads like video editing on my system. (And I’m trying to do more of both of those.)

So there’s a couple of options but basically, the lowest possible power consumption in a given use case is ideal.

The looking glass tech that a lot of folks here are working on is super interesting to me. When I heard about it, I started to fantasize about using some kind of workstation card with four or more Mini-DisplayPort Outs. Ideally, a cheaper AMD card that could support cheaper Freesync monitor at a high resolution and refresh rate.

The thought I had was, I could use this low-end workstation card for my daily desktop usage. But, if I wanted to game, I could do the frame buffer copying from a high-end gaming card given to a VM and use Freesync on the hosts’s workstation card. Hopefully I could “turn off” the high-end card when I’m not gaming and have it use little-to-no power.

Do you suppose I would use more or less power on my desktop with the workstation card handling my daily desktop usage, or would I always be adding the high-end card’s “idle” power draw to the equation and be better off using it as my “host card” and “gaming card?”

If you want the lowest consumption, I’d honestly suggest getting a NUC or similar light-weight PC for your everyday use and only powering on the big one if you need the raw power.