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 with 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 7700X was pulling a lot more than I would have expected at 97.7 watts and the same with the 7600X which was at 95.1 watts with 1% or less CPU usage. I hope that is something that can be addressed in the future with an update or maybe it is a mistake on my part that I can’t find. With the CPUs loaded up though power usage for the 7700X in wPrime was 225 watts and the 7600X was even better at 193 watts. AIDA64 did increase the power draw on both CPUs with the 7700X going up to 237 watts and the 7600X to 203 but overall both used less power than CPUs that were slower across the board.

AMD has both the Ryzen 7 7700X and the Ryzen 5 7600X listed as tower cooler capable whereas the new 7950X and 7900X are listed as needing a 240/280mm cooler. What complicates things though when it comes to getting a look at the temperatures is with precision boost 2 the CPUs will overclock up if you have the thermal capabilities. This means a few things. For one it means that even with the 240mm AIO used on our test bench that it will ramp up and still get hot. Intel does the same thing on most motherboards unless you have the wattages set to Intel’s suggested wattages which is what was done in our testing. But with Ryzen 7000 they are uncapped so this isn’t the best comparison. This overclocking however does mean that you get better performance depending on how good your cooling is. For the 7700X it leveled out at 94c in my testing which also tells us that it could still benefit a little bit from an even larger cooler. The 7600X on the other hand ran cooler at 87c. Overall they run warm and it makes me curious to see how the Ryzen 9 CPUs handle the same cooler.