Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Power Consumption
Interestingly, AMD reduced the idle power consumption of its second-gen Threadripper CPUs a bit. This is certainly motherboard-dependent, so be sure you're using the latest BIOS on your X399-based motherboard.
Just be ready for Windows 10 to bounce you back to 25-40W as background processes kick on and off (and particularly with PBO enabled for additional performance).
Ryzen Threadripper 2920X with PBO enabled hits clock rates as high as 4.3 GHz in our CAD workload, so power consumption spikes as well. The 2970WX is similar in that its high boost frequency results in a >64W measurement.
Our Witcher 3 benchmark is great for GPU power consumption comparisons. But it's less enlightening when we run it across different host processors because the underlying engine doesn't use enough cores. Assassin's Creed Odyssey is better about utilization, causing Threadripper's power to spike in excess of 100W. But that game's averages are far from reproducible, forcing us to keep it on the shelf.
Prime95 certainly isn't representative of an everyday scenario, but it's great for measuring peak theoretical power consumption. Some real-world applications pull even more power. For instance, a real Blender workload drives the 2970WX up to 230W, while we only measured 210W with Prime95! The same applies when we switch on PBO: Blender coaxes 447W from the Ryzen Threadripper chip compared to 416W in Prime95.
The smaller Ryzen TR 2920X is slightly different. It pulls 160W during the Blender workload, whereas Prime95 shows a power consumption of 180W. Activating PBO increases the delta: we measure 200W during the Blender test and 249W in Prime95. We can't explain why both CPUs react differently, but their results are reproducible.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
Intel 13th and 14th Gen 'Raptor Lake' instability troubles: Everything you need to know
Nvidia RTX 3050 A Laptop GPU specs revealed and it's as weak as expected — comes with just 1,768 CUDA cores and 4GB VRAM on a 64-bit bus
Intel 13th Gen CPUs allegedly have 4X higher return rate than the prior gen — retailer stats also claim Intel CPU RMAs are higher than AMD
