Power, Temps, Overclocking

Next up we have power consumption and it's important to measure using software that stresses all cores. I've found Corona works well for providing accurate results, so these load figures are based on the Corona benchmark after a single pass and I'm reporting the maximum logged result. This is total system draw and I'm using a Cabac Power-Mate to measure from the wall draw.

The Threadripper 1950X sucked down 257 watts and that meant total system consumption was 8% lower than that of the Core i9-7900X. Interestingly the 7980XE actually drew less power than the 7960X in this test. Both CPUs delivered similar performance so this suggests the 7960X had to clock more aggressively to achieve that result and this meant greater power draw.

Under full load the 7960X system was consuming around 25% more power than the 1950X while the 7980XE consumed 16% more power.

Due to the limited time we had to test these new CPUs I haven't explored the cooling options all that much. I simply threw them both on our custom liquid cooled X299 test bed and got benchmarking. So I'm yet to see how badly they punish air-coolers and AIO liquid coolers.

At stock clock speeds the 7980XE only pushed temps as high as 65 degrees which is certainly getting up there given that we have a massive 360mm radiator attached to the loop.

Let's see how things look after a little overclocking...

Time to tinker. The 7980XE overclocked all cores to 4.1 GHz quite easily and it might be possible to go further but for now this is where I stopped due to power draw and a few other reasons. The 7960X was happy at 4.3GHz and of course we previously got the 7900X to 4.7GHz. Threadripper has also been thrown in as well, clocked at 4GHz.

Clocked at 4.1GHz the 7980XE produced a multi-threaded score of 3974pts so expect to see people breaking the 4000 barrier with this one. That's a 20% increase over the out of the box performance. The 7960X saw a 17% boost as it hit an impressive 3681 pts.

The Threadripper 1950X only managed to boost its out of the box performance by 13% but even so that allowed for a score of 3425 pts. Overclocked, the 7980XE was 16% faster than the 1950X. So what difference does this make in our extreme Blender workload?

Well not a huge amount. Both Skylake-X parts are now 9% faster while Threadripper was 11% faster. Still the 16-core and 18-core Intel CPUs are blistering fast in this test.

What about power draw you ask? Overclocked, Threadripper pushes total system draw to 414 watts and that's pretty extreme. However, it also pales in comparison to the 7900X at 475 watts, the 7960X pushing total system draw just over 500 watts and finally the 7980XE at 530 watts. Remember this is just CPU load so if you have a few high-end GPUs in your workstation you might to require a ZPM to power it.