Power Consumption
Our power consumption results are based on the sensor readings provided by MSI's motherboard. We use adjusted averages and a special low-pass filter that discards brief peaks and valleys for these runs. The displayed sections show a two-minute window, but the bar graphs include the full 15 minutes that are necessary for precise measurements. We didn't have the i3 and Pentium models in the German lab, but we do have enough comparative data to provide a good sense of the power consumption trends of the Ryzen 3 1300X.
Power Consumption Of The Individual Ryzen 3 Processors
Only during the stress test does AMD's Ryzen 3 1300X encounter a significant power consumption increase. Even then, the differences aren’t that large, and almost completely in line with the performance gains.
Power Consumption Comparison For All CPUs
The differences between AMD's Ryzen CPUs at idle are extremely small. It takes a 15-minute test to measure such slight variations reliably. This lends credence to our hypothesis that the models with disabled resources aren't fused off electrically.
It's anyone's guess if there's a way to reactivate those pieces of on-die hardware, though we suspect AMD took measures to make sure it doesn't happen.
Working with a lightly threaded AutoCAD project doesn’t produce any large differences, either.
It takes more taxing workload for the higher-end Ryzen model to start drawing notably more power.
The same can be said for our stress test results.
Our findings confirm what we’ve found through our other Ryzen CPU reviews. Ryzen 3 isn’t significantly more efficient at idle and under low loads than Ryzen CPUs with more active cores or threads. This leads us to two conclusions. First, the new chip's quality isn’t worse to the point that it causes lower efficiency and higher power consumption. Second, deactivating parts of the chip doesn’t improve efficiency. In other words, the disabled parts are still, and permanently, supplied with power.
Compared to Intel's equivalent offerings, the power consumption demonstrated by AMD's Ryzen family is acceptable to good. The only exception is idle power consumption. AMD’s efficiency is really no better or worse than Intel's so long as the software you're using (including the operating system) supports Ryzen's power-saving features.
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