Power Consumption and Overclocking
If you remember back to our Core i9-7900X review, I was critical of the power consumption of the Skylake-X processor both because of its high power usage, but also the inaccuracy of Intel’s rated 140 watt TDP. The power consumption of the Ryzen Threadripper CPUs is 180 watts, 40 watts higher than the 7900X. How did it stand up?
In Cinebench, the 1950X uses 30 watts more power than the Core i9-7900X, pulling full system power at 268 watts. Compare that to the Ryzen 7 1800X at 155 watts (113 watts higher) or the Core i7-7700K at 122 watts (143 watts higher) and you cannot deny that the Threadripper platform is going to be a power-hungry beast. Idle power consumption is high as well – 95 watts on the 1950X is 40 watts higher than the 7900X and nearly 60 watts higher than the 1800X! We’ll see if BIOS tweaks can adjust this, or if our ASUS Zenith Extreme board just happens to be power hungry as well.
One of the messaging angles you will likely find in other reviews centers around power consumption per core. It’s an interesting metric even when amortized across the full system as we did below:
- Threadripper 1950X: 16.75 watts
- Core i9-7900X: 23.8 watts
The point of this comparison to show the advantage that AMD has on a per-core basis, but in truth, I don’t believe this metric is worth much today. When Intel releases its 12-core and higher Skylake-X parts in the near future, I do not expect power draw to continue to scale UP at 20-something watts per core; it’s just not possible. Similarly, the Threadripper 1920X has a rating of 21.75 watts/core in our testing, much higher than the 1950X.
Instead, performance per watt is the metric that consumers that even care about power consumption should be looking at. Can the Threadripper 1950X offer more performance in the applications that are important to them than the added power draw it requires over the Core i9-7900X? Our test setup shows that the 1950X uses ~12% more power than the 7900X in Cinebench, but it results in a 37% better score, netting an improved performance per watt metric. If performance on the 1950X is anything under 12% faster than the 7900X, then it is a net-negative on performance per watt.
Power per core matters in the data center market, but it isn’t a useful metric for consumers that are going with single socket solutions in workstations or enthusiast builds.
Overclocking Threadripper
Overclocking with Ryzen processors has been a fairly fixed art since release. The Ryzen 7 was able to hit somewhere around 4.0-4.2 GHz with all cores active and we have seen that trend continue through Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3, for the most part. Because the Threadripper CPUs are using two Zen cores, of which AMD claims are in the top 5% of the binning from the fab, we expected to see similar levels of scalability. Our expectations were not far off.
By simply setting the Vcore to 1.395v (which is higher than we'd like), I was able to get our 1950X to run at 4.0 GHz completely stable through a mess of workloads.
Performance scales by 12-13% in Blender, POV-Ray, and Cinebench in our testing.
What does not scale by 13% is power draw.
WOW. Under a full load, the overclocked Threadripper system uses an additional 140 watts of power, or 52%! Considering that is all power being pulled from the CPU directly, it means we are pushing nearly 300 watts of total consumer power from the CPU. Need more proof?
If you are going to be overclocking the Threadripper platform, make sure you have a significant cooler on your CPU.
I’m very curious on how will
I’m very curious on how will the two dies and memory modes affect virtualization? I’ve only experimented with VM in the past but is it possible to run two Hexa-cores windows VM and with each individual memory nodes assigned to each VM?
Are you setting the Blender
Are you setting the Blender tile sizes to 256 or 16/32?
Just wondering since an overclocked 5960x gets 1 minute 30 seconds on the BMW at 16×16 tile size. Significant difference that shouldn’t just be a result of the OC.
For reference: 256 or 512 are for GPU and 16 or 32 are for CPU – at least for getting the best and generally more comparable results to what we get over at BlenderArtists.
When reading is not enough,
When reading is not enough, the mistakes are OVER 9000!
“If you content creation is your livelihood or your passion, ”
” as consumers in this space are often will to pay more”
” Anyone itching to speed some coin”
” flagship status will be impressed by what the purchase.”
” but allows for the same connectivity support that the higher priced CPUs.”
“”””Editor””””
Now just point me to the
Now just point me to the pages… 😉
Nice to see a review with
Nice to see a review with more than a bunch of games tested. Keep up the good work!
Should not a test like 7-zip
Should not a test like 7-zip use 32 threads as max since that is what is presented to the OS??
now it only uses 50% of the threads on TR but 80% on i9-7900x.
Silly performance, looking
Silly performance, looking forward to the 1900X and maybe 1900.
I sometimes wonder why nobody
I sometimes wonder why nobody ever points out that within CCX (4 cores that can allow a lot of games to run comfortably) ZEN has latencies of half those of Intel CPUs. Binding a game to those 4 cores (8 threads like any i7) has significant impact on performance. It does not change memory latencies of course but core to core is much better.
I’m glad someone else noticed
I’m glad someone else noticed this besides myself. I noted this during the Ryzen launch & quickly noted that by using CPU affinity along w CPU priority to force my games to run exclusively within 1 CCX & take advantage of using high CPU processing time on these same CPU cores I could take advantage of this up to a point.
What all this shows to me is that the OS & game developers software need to be revised to better handle this architecture at the core logic level instead of usersAMD having to provideuse methods to try to do this that cannot be used in a more dynamic fashion. I’ve ran some testing on Win 10’s Game Mode & discovered that MS is actually trying to use CPU affinity to dynamically set running game threads to be run on the fastestlowest latency CPU cores to “optimize” game output thru the CPU but it still tends to cross the CPU CCX’s at times if left on it’s own.
What I’ve found is by doing this my games run much smoother w a lot less variance which gives the “feel” of games running faster (actual FPS is the same) due to lower input lag & much better GPU frametime variance graph lines w very few spikes….essentially a fairly flat GPU frametime variance line which is what you want to achieve performance-wise.
Just to note….my box is running an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X CPUSapphire R9 Fury X graphics card w no OC’s applied to either the CPU or GPU.
It’s a step in the right direction but needs more refinement at the OS level……
As expected, performance per
As expected, performance per dollar is crap in single threaded tasks, which most workloads are. Games don’t even use more than 1 or 2 cores.
Yea games only use 2 cores
Yea games only use 2 cores lol
http://i.imgur.com/Hg3Ev5p.png
And “as expected”, we have
And “as expected”, we have yet another Intel shill complaining about gaming performance on a production CPU, which isn’t made for gaming (although it’s not bad in the least and has a longer future as devs code for more than Intel’s tiny core count (under $1000))..
-“performance per dollar is crap in single threaded workloads”…
Well, since these aren’t sold as a single or dual core CPU, performance per dollar as a unit is beyond everything on Intel’s menu.
– “Games don’t even use more than 1 or 2 cores”
Well, I’ve been using a FX-8350 for 2 years now, and I always see all 8 cores loaded up on every single game I play (and I have many). Windows 10 makes use of these cores even when it’s not coded in programs. It would work even better if devs started coding for at least 8 cores, and I believe they will start doing this in earnest now that 8-core CPUs are now considered average core counts (unless you’re with Intel).
You would have been better off stating that core vs core is in Intel’s favor on the 4-core chips and some others, but ironically the “performance per dollar”, as you mention is superior with AMD.. in every way.
What memory are you using,
What memory are you using, and could you name a 64GB kit that works in XMP? And why 3200Mhz over 3600?
Intel is still superior both
Intel is still superior both in raw performance and in perf/$. If you were being objective you wouldn’t have given slapped an editor’s choice on this inferior product.
In Handbrake the 1800x is 40%
In Handbrake the 1800x is 40% slower than the 1950x and in reverse the 1950x is 67% faster than 1800x.
Open cinebench with a TR or
Open cinebench with a TR or even an 1800x. Show me any Intel chip that can come within 20% of the 1950x. The entire Ryzen 7 lineup is king of the “perf/$” category. 1800x = $365 on eBay right now. Look how close it matches with Intel products that are double the price or worse.
If you want to compare single core perf vs Intel, you can win an argument.. at the cost of very high power draw and even worse cash draw. Perf/$ is a dead argument for any Intel fanboy. Find something else. BTW, are you also commenting under “Thatman007” or something? Sound like the same Intel mouthpiece.
Sorry for necroposting, but
Sorry for necroposting, but it really belongs here:
The recent Meltdown vulnerability and its performance implications on Intel CPUs pretty much leveled the playground now. After reading the article and all the comments above I opted for a very good B350 motherboard and a Ryzen 1800X to replace my Core i7 5930K (Haswell). Reason is that my CPU will likely be hit very badly performance wise by the upcoming Windows 10 security update. Intel should pay back 30% to all affected CPU owners, actually…
Reason is that likely I would not gain anything from NUMA, except of the additional complications. So I opt for the easier to manager (lower) power consumption and less noise from cooling as a result.
Thank you for collecting all the great info.