Power Consumption & Temperatures

Power Consumption

We show energy consumption based on the entire PC (motherboard / processor / graphics card / memory / SSD). This number depends and will vary per motherboard (added ICs / controllers / wifi / Bluetooth) and PSU (efficiency). Keep in mind that we measure the ENTIRE PC, not just the processor's power consumption. Your average PC can differ from our numbers if you add optical drives, HDDs, soundcards etc. 

Power consumption measurements will differ per PC and setup. Your attached components use power but your motherboard can also have additional ICs installed like an audio controller, 3rd party chips, network controllers, extra SATA controllers, extra USB controllers, and so on. These parts all consume power, so these results are a subjective indication. Next, to that, we stress all CPU cores 100% and thus show peak power consumption. Unless you transcode video with the right software your average power consumption will be much lower.

You can see what AMD did there, slow down the cores to keep that 280 Watt TDP in line. It might be a lot of power, but power consumption for the entire PC converted per core makes this one of the most energy-efficient processors available on the market. 

Normally more cores equal more energy consumption, accumulation, period. However, when we take into account the entire PC (motherboard/chipset/GPU/memory/etc.) and stress ONLY all cores on the platform, and divide that by the number of cores you'll notice a far prettier picture, the Threadripper 3000 processors are among the most energy-friendly for your many-core platform budget. Impressive, huh?

Temperatures

The reason we do not table up temperature results is that we'd need to apply the same cooling over and over on all platforms. Also, coolers (fan RPM) react differently to TDP and variables like BIOS. 

There's no denying it, AMD performed some serious binning and tweaked that TDP perferctly. 64 cores / 128 threads create a lot of heat. Under a stressed load on all cores (AIDA CPU) we hover in an 75 Degrees C delta. We do apply a 240mm Enermax LCS unit set at default fan RPM settings. You're going to need proper cooling to tame the beast, but overall that is pretty miraculous to observe.

The fastest cores

In light of advertised Turbo clock frequencies on the Ryzen platform, we want to show you the fastest cores that can be reached with a few or single thread(s). Our 3990X processor reaches 4350 MHz and can do so on multiple cores, advertised is 4300 Mhz.

Stressing all cores

The base clock of this processor is 2900 MHz, meaning if all cores are stressed the worst it can fall back to is that frequency (under normalized conditions). So when we place load on the 64 cores we can see the processor manages to stay above that value, which is good. And of course, the multiplier and frequency will go much lower when in idle, again this is under load.

You had to scroll down, didn't you? :)