Power Usage and Temperatures

For the last testing section, I just like to take a look at power usage and overall temperatures. These aren’t important to everyone, but in some cases (literally and figuratively) it is very important. For the power testing I have our AIDA64 stress test running to put the CPU under load and then I use a Kill-A-Watt to document the power being drawn for the entire system. In this case, the 2600 actually pulled a few more watts than the 2700. I think this comes back to those base clock speeds again as when all of the cores are loaded the boost clocks aren’t going to come into play as much. For comparison, the 133 watts that the 2600 pulled is 30 watts lower than the 1600X that it performed right within almost every test. This is in the bottom half of our charts but still 16 watts higher than Intel’s ik7-8700K.

For temperature testing, I used the same AIDA64 Stress Test as before to heat things up. This is done using a Noctua U12S heatsink and Noctua thermal paste, not the included stock coolers. This is done to keep testing consistent as possible between CPUs. Of course, all of these tests are done using the sensors onboard the CPU and motherboard and those themselves aren’t always the most accurate. So keep that in mind with these results. So how did the 2600 and 2700 do? Well, they both had the same result, not too much of a shock considering they both have the same TDP. The 2700X and 2600X being a little lower in temps though was interesting and a great example as to why testing like this is only going to get us into a range. I don’t know if our launch 2700X and 2600X were just better chips or if there was some other issue, but what is still clear though is that the new Ryzen 2000 series CPUs still run worlds cooler than what Intel is putting out right now. This is in part due to AMD using solder not cheap thermal compound under the integrated heatspreader to help pull that heat up and out of the package into the heatsink.