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 Ultra 9 285K pulled 77.1 watts and with the Ultra 5 245K, it was down to 69.2 watts. This was better than the two 9000 Series Ryzen CPUs I tested and the last generations 14900K and 14600K. Idle and near idle is where a lot of usage is and it's good to see those numbers dropping back down. Under load, the Ultra 9 285K pulled 252 watts when using wPrime and 328 watts with the FPU workload putting the CPU to work. With the AIDA64 workload that was 17.8% less than with the 14900K in that same test. The 245K pulled 152 watts in wPrime and 223 with the Aida64 FPU workload. It tied the 14600K in that specific test which was interesting.
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, we know that Intel’s new design has moved things around on the chip. Older coolers work, but it looks like there are companies with coolers better optimized for LGA 1851 are coming as well so cooler performance also contributes to these numbers as well. That said the Ultra 9 285K did improve on the temperatures that I was seeing when running this same test on the 14900K. The 14900K also ran into thermal throttling where the 285K didn’t but that isn’t to say this CPU runs cool, at least not with this workload. Intel’s focus is improving temperatures while gaming and this is a significantly higher load than that. For comparison the 285K ran at 91c with the FPU workload but at 72c with the AIDA64 CPU workload which is closer to what you would see when gaming. The Ultra 5 245K also improved as well dropping from 77c down to 64c.
