Power Consumption, Operating Temperatures
Looking at power consumption when testing with Ashes of the Singularity, we see that the 2700X only increases total system consumption by 4% when compared to the 2600X, it also only used 2% more than the 8700K. Now the Core i7-8720X looks bad here using 15% more power than the 2700X but remember it was 14% faster as well, so performance per watt is actually much the same in this title.
Overclocking only increased the power draw for the second-gen Ryzen CPUs by a small margin, 6% for the 2700X for example. The 8700K saw total system consumption increase by 18% making it less efficient once overclocked.
The 2700X and 2600X once again consumed a similar amount of power, this time when testing with Far Cry 5. They were basically on par with the 8700K but used less power than the Skylake-X parts. So in this title the second-gen Ryzen CPUs were much more efficient than the 7820X and 7800X.
Overclocking didn't have a huge impact on power draw for the second-gen Ryzen CPUs though it did see the Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake CPUs consume loads more power.
For our Blender workload the 2600X used roughly the same amount of power as the 8700K while the 2700X was on par with the 7800X. Overclocked, the second-gen Ryzen CPUs consumed around 20% more power, which is a lot better than the almost 60% increase seen when overclocking the 8700K.
The 2700X pushed system draw 9% higher than the 1800X and it only reduced the encode time by 4%. Interestingly though, the 2600X consumed just 10% more power than the 1600 but was able to reduce the encode time by 16%. In terms of performance per watt, the second-gen Ryzen CPUs were comparable to the Skylake-X 7820X and 7800X in this title.
Operating Temperatures
The Ryzen 5 2600X performed had very reasonable temperatures out of the box using the provided Wraith Spire cooler. While gaming you can expect temperatures to hover between 50 and 60 degrees, assuming you have a well ventilated case. It's worth noting that the fan was quiet throughout these tests and overclocking had little impact on temperatures when gaming. However, we did see a massive increase for the heavy Blender workload and after an hour the CPU peaked at 90 degrees.
The 2700X gets the fancy new Wraith Prism cooler and while more substantial than the Spire, temperatures climbed higher when paired with the eight-core CPU. Out of the box, the Prism allowed the 2700X to hit 64 degrees in our game test and 92 degrees for the Blender stress test. Needless to say, the Prism couldn't handle our overclock. Gaming wasn't too bad but the max load test with Blender saw the thermal limits reached and often caused the overclock to fail.
Strapping on the Corsair H150i Pro solved this issue and reduced the Blender load temp down to 81 degrees which is reasonable. Gaming temperatures now dropped below 60 degrees as well. So overclockers will want to upgrade the cooler and I'll explore more cost effective options in a future article.