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 (not really an issue here obviously). 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 Threadripper 9980X pulled 140 watts, where the 9970X pulled 128 watts, both were higher than what I see from the mainstream line, but nothing too crazy. Putting things under load, on the other hand, you can quickly see how both CPUs are pulling a lot more than a 9950X3D, for example. With wPrime putting things under load, the 9970X pulled 499 watts, and the 9980X pulled 534 watts. Our AID64 numbers get a little weird, however. This is another case where the CPU overshoots the benchmark, and our 9980X wasn’t able to get under full load using the FPU Stress Test, so it “only” pulled 451 watts to the 504 from the 9970X.
The issues with AIDA64 carried over to our temperature testing as well, because that is how we put everything under load for temperature testing. At least the AIDA64 Stress Test CPU workload worked, so those numbers are correct. The other factor here is what numbers we want to go off of. Threadripper is a huge CPU, and we have three temperature numbers that we can work from. There is CPU, CPU Diode, and CPU package. The CPU number is the temperature on the CPU socket from the motherboard, I’m not worried about that number here. Then we have CPU package and the Diode. The CPU Package shows the whole CPU, but the diode shows us how hot things are getting right at the die. My graph numbers are all using the CPU package, but I should note the diode numbers were crazy with the 9980X sitting at 126c °C and the 9970X at 129c °C. In the end, our CPU workload results are the main focus as they were under full load, and the 9980X leveled off at 77c where the 9970X was at 79c °C. For comparison, the 9950X3D was at 70c with a similarly sized cooler. But these are extremely powerful CPUs, which frankly, an even larger cooler than the 360mm AIO that AMD sent over wouldn’t be a bad idea.
