Power Usage and Temperatures
So part of everything still being on the 14nm process means that Intel isn’t able to take advantage of the power and cooling benefits that smaller build processes like 7nm that Ryzen is on currently offer. This was an issue with the 10th gen processors so we know even going in that it is a concern this time around as well. It is also why the 11900K is capped at the 8 cores. So for testing power, I took a look at the overall power our test system pulled in using a kill-a-watt. I tested idle, load using wPrime, and then load using AIDA64’s FPU stress test which is very demanding. The 11900K and 11600K both were close on their idle wattage which was at 70.9 and 71.9 watts respectively. The 11900K when under the wPrime load had our system pulling 248 watts which was high, but lower than our 10900K did. Then the 11600K was lower even though they have the same thermal wattage cap at 197 watts.
The AIDA64 FPU Stress Test is extra demanding on CPUs and here both of the 11th gen CPUs came in at about the same wattage at 203 and 201 watts. Keep in mind this and the results above were both with MCE turned off, I did test MCE on which I will go over in a second.
While doing the AIDA64 FPU Stress Test I also took a look at thermals. Unlike in the past where I would test using a standard tower air cooler. I have moved over to the H100i dual 120mm fan AIO due to the heat being put out by these new CPUs being just too much for what used to be an “average” air cooler. Here I was surprised to see the 11900K run a little cooler than the 11600K, but both were still pushing the limits of where I would want my water cooled PC to be running and this was with MCE turned on keeping things very tight.
Turning MCE on really changed things when I started looking at the numbers. Like for wattage pulled. The 11900K went from 203 watts which it also pulled when I did the same AIDA64 workload with adaptive boost. This was after the initial surge of wattage that the CPUs use with the single/dual-core turbo boost which pushed the wattage pulled up to 260 for the first 30 seconds. After that things leveled off. With MCE on however that leveled off wattage was 336 watts.
When it comes to thermals, you can see how much of a difference MCE made a difference as well with it going from 63 up to 90c, and frankly, even that was with the CPU starting to throttle down.
