Power Usage and Temperatures

For some people, performance is the only thing important, but for others, power usage and temperatures also play a role so we do take a look at both of those as well. This is especially important in SFF or even just smaller mid-sized builds and it affects the components you need to get for your system as well as your PSU and cooler. To take a look at power usage I ran three different tests. I noted the idle power draw of our entire system then I took a look at the load wattage of the system using two different workloads. One was wPrime and the second was AIDA64 using their FPU workload which is extremely demanding. At idle the testbench with the Ryzen 7 8700G pulled 77.4 watts and with the Ryzen 5 8600G it pulled 78.8, really a wash between the two but this is more than what I’ve seen on older Intel CPUs but a big improvement over some of the highest end Ryzen CPUs. The 7950X in our launch testing was pulling 114 watts on a similar configuration. The first under-load power test was when running wPrime and we see that wattage goes up from the high 70’s up to 169 for the 8700G and 158 for the 8600G. They do have the same listed TGP but the lower core count CPU does pull a little less here. This was better than with the 7700X and 7700, AMD has continued to improve on this with the closest of the 7000 Series Ryzen CPUs being the 7600 which pulled 173. Using AIDA64’s FPU stress test does normally change the total wattage usage but it didn’t change things for the 8700G which was already at its TGP so it stayed at 169 watts. The 8600G however did pull more here and went up to 169 watts to match the 6700G.

I’ve spoken in the past about how temperature testing isn’t an end all be all result. CPU to CPU with the same CPU can be different and that gets even more complicated once you add in different motherboards and BIOS revisions as well. Not to mention different coolers. In this case, both the 8700G and 8600G were tested using a 360 mm AIO water cooler and in the same situation. I even ran this test multiple times with the same results. Our results are going to be a little confusing though. The 8700G came in at 66c each time I tested it whereas the 8600G shows 80c. They pull the same wattage when using AIDA64’s Stress test so there isn’t any reason for those results to be far far apart but they are. With that, there isn’t any good reason to compare them with the other CPUs as we don’t know which result is accurate but I did want to at least address it here.