Power Usage and Temperatures

Depending on your build, power usage and thermals could be the most important aspect of a CPU (like in SFF builds) or not important at all. Being budget-focused, both the 3300X and the 3100 aren’t likely to be a big concern. Especially with the 65-watt TDP that both CPUs have listed. But I did still want to take a look. For power usage, I use our Kill-A-Watt to measure the total power pulled from our test bench in three situations. In the big graph, I check out idle power draw as well as the power pulled when running wPrime. Both CPUs support a special Eco mode which clearly wasn’t working at idle on either CPU. Their wPrime power draw isn’t bad though at 104 and 114 for the total system draw. I then also run AIDA64 using the floating point stress test which is the most demanding and wattage moved up to 125 for the 3100 and 137 for the 3300X. This was right in line with the mid-range of the Ryzen CPUs as well.

For thermal testing, I stuck with that same AIDA64 FPU test, which is on the far end of extreme to show the worst possible case for CPU temperatures while using as standard of a cooler as I can with the Noctua 120mm tower cooler. The 3300X ended up warming up to 75 degrees Celsius and the 3100 to 71. I wouldn’t call this hot, considering it isn’t the biggest cooler. But it isn’t cool either with both CPUs in the mid to high range on the chart.