Power Usage and Temperatures
For my last bit of testing, I couldn’t let the Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G get through the office without taking a look at their power usage and temperatures. Especially given all of the Ryzen testing I did with ITX coolers a while back, I wanted to see how these compared to see if they will be great as a tiny decent LAN rig.
So the first thing I wanted to take a look at was overall power usage. To do this I test our idle and load wattage for the entire system using a Kill-A-Watt. Idle is done without running anything obviously and the 2200G came in at 54.5 watts and the 2400G pulled a little more at 64.1 watts. Then for load wattage, I tested just the CPU, not the onboard to compare it with the other CPUs tested using wPrime to make sure each core was maxed and saw 114 on the 2400G and 85.9 on the 2200G. This put the 2200G in just under the 1200X and the 2400G with the 1500X as expected.
Then for temperature testing, I jumped into AIDA64 and ran their stress test using the FPU only setting because it heats things up the most. I did this using our Noctua NH-U12S cooler but I was a little surprised by my results. In fact, I did them a few times, reseating the heatsink on the 2400G. The 57 degrees of the 2200G was about what I expected but I thought the 2400G would be able the same. They have the same TDP and the 2400G doesn’t run that much higher in clock speed and this test was only checking with CPU power, not any onboard video adding heat. Swapping to the stock cooler I did the same tests. The Wraith Stealth didn’t perform the best in my Ryzen cooler testing so I wanted to confirm that it would be okay with these CPUs. What I found was that it was fine for the 2200G but the 2400G was actually running into some thermal throttling for me. I suspect that our 2400G heat issues are related to AMD's change to thermal paste under the heatspreader. Maybe ours doesn’t have the best application, but I do know that I would look at using an aftermarket cooler for both CPUs if given the chance. The included cooler is fine for a while but something more efficient including one of the other Wraith coolers would be much better suited to keep things cool.
