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 7950X pulled 114 watts which is high but not far from the 95 watts that the other 7000 series CPUs were doing at idle. This is an issue that I hope we see toned down with future updates to keep power usage from being too crazy when you are doing light loads or nothing at all. Putting the 7950X and 7900X under load with wPrime I saw them both reach near the top of our charts with the 7950X at the top at 333 watts from the system and 291 watts for the 7900X putting it behind the Intel i9-10900K. With AIDA64 FPU as the workload surprisingly the 7950X dropped 3 watts down to 330 but the 7900X did increase in usage at 305 watts.

With the 7700X and the 7600X AMD had them listed as being tower cooler compatible, but with the higher TDP of the 7950X and the 7900X AMDs suggestion is a 240mm or 280mm radiator so I was curious to see how the thermal numbers would be with our 240mm radiator. With the way that precision boost 2 works however all of the CPUs consistently push things up into the 90c and higher range. The 7950X however was locked in at 95c, 1 degree higher than the 7700X. The 7900X like the 7600X did run cooler at 91c. Basically no matter what you have for cooling it will throttle up to use the cooling that you give it to get the best possible performance.