AMD Threadripper 2970WX and 2920X - the smaller offshoots of the big crunchers | Page 11

Interestingly, one has managed to reduce the power consumption of the thread rippers in the idle somewhat, so that now also reasonable values appear here. This is certainly also motherboard-dependent and you should always take care to use only the current BIOS outside your X399 motherboard.

However, the background processes of Windows 10 often play a prank, because with every slight twitching you are very quickly back in areas around 25 to 40 watts, depending on, especially with PBO.

Since the Ryzen TR 2920X with activated Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) in particular boosts very high (in CAD it was up to 4.3 GHz in places), then the power consumption is also comparatively high, whereby the then 62 watts are now nothing to worry about. With the Ryzen TR 2970WX the situation is similar, because here too the CPU with activated PBO boosts itself to the top of the charts.

Witcher 3 is not something that could really utilize the CPU even in the beginning over more than four cores. With Assassin's Creed Odyssey, there are significantly more threads and the power consumption increases in the peaks already well over 100 watts. Nevertheless, I did not choose the game for the charts, because the average values were never really reproducible.

The maximum power consumption is such a thing in itself and Prime95 certainly is not an everyday scenario. But, you have to be very brave now – a real blender workload drives the Ryzen Threadripper TR 2970WX up to 230 watts, the measured 210 watts of Prime95 are much less! The same applies to the run with the PBO activated, where 447 watts instead of the 416 watts are needed.

The case for the smaller Ryzen TR 2920X is slightly different. If the Blender workload is plentiful to 160 watts, Prime95 hits the bank with 180 watts. With the PBO activated, it gets even more stark, because the almost 200 watts at Blender are compared to 249 watts at Prime95. It is difficult to explain why both CPUs react completely differently, but it is reproducible.