AMD Ryzen 7 3700X & Ryzen 9 3900X review - Power Consumption and temperatures

Power Consumption

In an IDLE state, a PC (motherboard / processor / Graphics Card / memory / SSD) consumes roughly 50 Watts. 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. 

Various load conditions - there is a dedicated graphics card installed (RTX 2080 Ti) - we need to note that the CVIIIH motherboard is smacked full with extra chips, so the overall Wattage was a notch higher due to that.

I want to make it very clear that 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.

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 (RPM) react differently to TDP and variables like BIOS. Therefore we simply plot a temperature stress test. Good news btw, AMD is no longer making a distinction between Tdie and Tctl (offset for fan activity). So there is just one variable to monitor, ergo what you see is what you get.

 Above: EK liquid AIO cooling kit with the 3700X. We reach a max temp of 64 Degrees C (Tdie). That is running a 1024M Prime test.

  
Above: EK liquid AIO cooling kit with the 3900X. We reach a max temp of 68 Degrees C (Tdie). That is running a 1024M Prime test.