Further Thermal and PL State Watt Exploration
Over the years Intel has stepped away from their reference motherboard. That means that all AIB motherboards come pre-tuned. Not a single motherboard is following the strict settings as advised by Intel anymore. This not only will give performance differences between motherboards, heat and wattage can vary a lot. On this page, I wanted to share a bit more information as to how that works.
ASUS for example at default will apply high PL states and in some situations will already lock all core ratios for you. For our reference reviews, we always select 'Enforce all limits', as that is as close to reference performance as possible. We test on an MSI Z790 ACE MAX motherboard. here PL1/PL2 states will be applied based on the cooling solutions you select. You have three options:
Here you can see that MSI offers different PL states based on your cooling solution; Boxes, Tower and Water coolers. Each selection will apply to a different setting. Basically, the boxed cooler setting will apply close to reference defaults. If you have a good performance cooler you can try out the Tower Air Cooler setting, in our belief the best option for a good balance between performance, cooling and power consumption.
That Water Cooling setting however is tricky, you'll remove all Pl restrictions and on both PL1 and PL2, you're unlocked. Stressing the processor will ultimately result in temperature and wattage values that will raise your eyebrows. We'll show you that.
Above: Boxed Cooler preference - Maximum Package power is measured at 215W, temps remain under 80 Degrees C
Above: Tower Air Cooler preference - While package temp does stay under control, we reach 288 Watts power draw and temps reaching (peak) to 94 Degrees C. Very high, but manageable.
Above: Water Cooler preference - Here we now see our package power consumption rise towards 318 Watt and yeah, even with our high-end Corsair LCS cooler, we hit 100-103 Degrees C under full processor load.
So what (pardon the pun) do all these settings bring you in performance, well from left to right Water, Tower Air cooler and stock boxed cooler settings:
As you can see, the single-threaded performance remains roughly the same, but multi-threading has substantial differences. We recommend the Tower air cooler.
