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 Ryzen 5 9600X pulled 94.6 watts. This was right in line with the 9700X which was just a hair lower and similar to Intel’s 14600K as well but higher than the 8700G and 8600G that we tested last year which are also 65-watt CPUs. The first under-load power test was when running wPrime and the 9600X pulled 183 during that benchmark, just two watts away was the 9700X at 185 watts. That is 10 watts lower than the previous generation 7600X which is good to see. Using AIDA64’s FPU stress test for the last test which is typically a little more demanding, neither of the CPUs has too much of a spike with the 9600X going up 3 watts and the 9700X dropping a few watts.

I’ve spoken in the past about how temperature testing isn’t an end-all-be-all-be-all result. CPU to CPU with the same CPU can be different and that gets even more complicated once you add in different motherboards and BIOS revisions as well. Not to mention different coolers. In this case, both the Ryzen 5 9600X and the Ryzen 7 9700X were tested with a standard 240mm AIO cooler. This is an area where AMD focused on improving with this generation of CPUs with chip layout optimization, changing the location of temperature sensors to reduce thermal resistance. All together both of the CPUs tested today came in noticeably cooler than the previous generation. The 9600X was a little warmer at 68c whereas the 9700X was at 65c. The 9600X does have a slightly higher base clock which might have contributed to that, or it just could be CPU variance like I mentioned at the start. For comparison, the 8600G ran at 80c when I tested it and the 7700X and 7600X were at 94c and 87c. This was a huge move in the right direction. I don’t mind my CPU running warm, but scorching hot was concerning and put even more heat into the room which can compound the problem if you don’t have air conditioning.