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 7 9800X3D the power draw leveled off at 96.3 watts. That was an improvement of 6.3 watts compared to the 7800X3D and 3 watts more than a similar system with the Ryzen 7 9700X and 9600X. When running wPrime, the system with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D pulled 208 watts, putting it 18 watts below the 14900K and an impressive 44 watts below the new Core Ultra 7 285K. It was however higher than the 7800X3D by 38 watts. With the more demanding Aida64 stress test running the FPU workload the Ryzen 7 9800X3D pulled 255 watts. This was 84 watts more than the 7800X3D but 50 watts lower than the 285K.
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, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D leveled off with the FPU workload at 81 degrees. That was 8 degrees higher than the 7800X3D but still significantly lower than what Intel has had for the last few generations with the 14900K at 95c and the 285K at 91c in the same test. I was also curious how the more realistic CPU workload on the Aida64 Stress Test would compare and in that test, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D leveled off at 55c. This is a lot closer to what you should expect when gaming, but the FPU workload is more in line if you are planning on running applications like rendering.
