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 as 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 7800X3D pulled 103 watts which is down from the 115 of the 7950X3D but still high like the other Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. The 7800X3D has the same 120-watt TDP as the other 3D CPUs which is up from the 7700X. When put under load with wPrime the 7800X3D and test bench pulled 170 watts and the AIDA64 FPU workload had a similar wattage at 171 watts. This was surprising given the 120-watt TDP, putting the 7800X3D down around where the 65 Watt 7000 Series CPUs were running.

For temperature testing on the Ryzen 7 7800X3D while using the AIDA64 FPU workload I monitored temps until they leveled off. For cooling, we have our standard 240mm Corsair AIO cooler and the 7800X3D leveled off at 73c. This was 6 degrees lower than the 7950X3D did and is much more reasonable than the original higher TDP 7000 Series Ryzen CPUs which are up near the top of the charts.