Power Usage and Temperatures

For power usage, I ran the Ryzen 5 4500 on our test bench while hooked up to the Kill-A-Watt and recorded the total wattage that the system pulls. Running at idle our system leveled out at 63.7 watts which wasn’t too bad, especially compared to the 5600X. For the load power, I did two tests, one was while running wPrime which the Ryzen 5 4500 system pulled a peak of 114-watts. This put the 6 core system back in the middle of the early launch CPUs like the Ryzen 1500X with only 4 cores and the 2700. When switching to AIDA64’s FPU stress test for the workload our wattage went up to 139 watts but stayed down in with some of the older Ryzen CPUs like the 4 core 3300X but here you can see the Zen 3 based 5600X just 10 watts higher as a reminder at how much more efficient the newer architecture is.

I also took a look at thermals. For this, I ran AIDA64 FPU Stress Test again which is about as extreme as workloads get. I let this run until temperatures stopped changing. For cooling our test system was running a Corsair H100i 240mm AIO cooler. The Ryzen 5 4500 leveled off at 70c which was 3 degrees higher than the faster Zen 3 based Ryzen 5 5600X. Overall the Ryzen 5 4500 was still able to run cool, but being an older architecture wasn’t helping things with the extreme workload.