AMD Ryzen 9 7950X in faster or more frugal: Gaming and workstation undervolting with light and shadow

Of course, you’ve been wondering the whole time, where the colported temperature drops are now. They’ll be here in a minute. After all, what is not burned up does not have to be cooled down.

Partial load with few cores: Loss-making business with announcement

But first, we’ll take another look at AutoCAD and the Ryzen 9 7950X, since it’s rather the partial load range analogous to the games. And we see once again that you stay under 125 watts anyway and that all three settings act very similarly at the socket in the end. If you’re screaming for an 85- or even 65-watt setting here: better buy a Ryzen 7700X or Ryzen 5 7600X and set everything to 65 watts. you usually get more of them in such workloads.

We even see that the efficiency drops slightly by releasing a few MHz in AutoCAD. This effect even increases with increasing PPT brake, because AutoCAD 2021 now prefers only a few cores and never needs all of them at the same time. I’m showing you this on purpose because sometimes it’s really better to buy a small CPU and throttle it down rather than completely slowing down such a big beast.

Now comes the aha effect after all

It’s just not really purposeful when you only run Cinebench or Blender and then trumpet the big throttle with the icy breath. Let’s first take a look at the power consumption of Blender and the igoBOT and also quickly recall the result.  It only takes about 11.6 percentage points more time. That’s exactly what we’re going to remember now, please.

However, the CPU only needs 129 watts instead of 235 watts thanks to the throttling! However, the unrestrained CPU’s lead of 11.6 percentage points in render time is offset by a much higher power consumption of an incredible 82.2 percentage points more. That is exactly what you think you can prove with Cinebench. But it only applies to such very specific workloads and cannot simply be generalized.

By the way, you can also see this in the efficiency, which once again increases breathtakingly. Well, at least when it comes to talking.

Temperatures at full load

The temperatures were always low enough during gaming to even be able to use the Ryzen 9 7950X without any worries. You don’t have to finger around for hours, because the shock only ever came during full load and things like Cinebench R23 or Blender. That’s exactly where we want to see how the more than 82 fewer percentage points in power consumption have a positive effect in the end.

And yes, there is almost an icy wind blowing and we have finally experienced our hoped-for sensation! Even the air cooler only shakes briefly and then calmly cools everything the way you want it to. The 129 watts don’t leave any scares at 20 °C room temperature and it even cools much better than a Ryzen 7 7700X, because only 64 to 65 watts arrive here per CCD instead of 137 watts. Even at a room temperature of 30 °C, you will still be able to comfortably stay below 80 °C with this constellation, and one wonders what drove AMD to overpower the curve so much.

Summary and conclusion

Which brings us to the conclusion. As long as the games fall below a certain power consumption, you can get a bit more clock with an optimized curve, but the really big savings are unfortunately missing, apart from a few exceptions in the games. Positive are all games where the CPU consumes well over 100 watts of power. A corrective often works wonders, and I very deliberately included all the individual graphics.

To really save significantly, you also have to manually undervolt (lower the offset by a maximum of 0.09 volts to 0.1 volts) and hope for the good cores. If you have time (I unfortunately didn’t), you can do this with the curve for each individual core, then you definitely notice more of it than with the “All Cores” compromise shown today without any further decreases. Unfortunately, my sample was rather a loser in the CPU lottery in this respect.

Unfortunately, what is often sold as a huge sensation in the social networks only occurs when this CPU consumes more than the estimated 170 watts because the cores are (allowed to) run amok ex works in Blender & Co. Then the manual capping to e.g. 125 watts is really sensible, very purposeful and also really impressive in terms of efficiency. The last few seconds that you can still squeeze out with 235 watts are completely uselessly invested and wasted energy. AMD really has to ask itself why it got involved in such nonsense in the first place.

Let’s take away from today’s test that the Ryzen 7xxx with optimized Curve runs significantly more frugal and cooler in the full load range and that you can at least get more performance for free in the partial load range like gaming. Those who don’t use a chiller (most of them) can also gain clock with lower temperatures, but that’s not really much. It is definitely worthwhile to give it a try, even if the big bang unfortunately failed to materialize, except for Blender and Co.