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 9 9950X3D pulled 105 watts which is a little higher than the 96.3 watts that the 9800X3D pulled and higher than the 77.1 watts of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K. When testing wPrime the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and test bench pulled 341 watts which puts it up at the top of our chart even above the older Ryzen 9 7950X. That is 133 watts higher than the 9800X3D and 89 watts higher than the 285K. Changing to the AIDA64 Stress Test using the FPU workload the wattage dropped down to 308 watts whereas the Intel CPUs jumped up on this test putting the Ryzen 9 9950X3D 20 watts below 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 9 9950X3D ran at 71 watts with this workload, putting it in the middle of the pack and (surprisingly) below the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Switching to the CPU workload which is more realistic to what you might see when gaming the Ryzen 9 9950X3D only dropped 1 degree which tells us that the CPU was being throttled back with the mode demanding workload.
