Power Testing – AMD R3 1300X vs. 7350K, R5 1600X, & More
We’re moving on from wall meter power consumption testing and instead measuring power drawn at the EPS12V cables. This at-the-rails method of current measurement allows us to calculate power consumption in wattage, resulting in a more accurate, granular reading for power utilization by the CPU. Other big contributors to power consumption – namely the GPU – are eliminated from measurements in this way, and so we can better isolate CPU power behavior.
Power testing is something we only just added when working on Vega, so we’re working on porting power testing over to X299 and other CPUs. For the meantime, we’ve tested the R3 units, the 1700, the 7350K, and we’re adding a couple others on as we go. Again, this isn’t at the wall measuring – we are clamping the EPS12V outputs. We won’t have a full list of components tested for power consumption immediately, but it’s on the way. This is our debut of our new CPU power consumption testing.
R3 1300X Power Consumption – Idle
Under idle Windows 10 conditions, the AMD R3 1300X stock CPU consumes about 3.7W on our ASUS Crosshair Hero VI motherboard, +/-2% error. For comparison, the Intel i3-7350K is showing 4.9W, or about 7W when overclocked.
R3 1300X Power Consumption – Cinebench
R3 1300X Power Consumption – Blender
A Blender workload consumed 42W for the stock 1300X, with an overclock increasing power consumption to 52W, or 24% more power for what we later find out is 4.6% render time reduction. The i3-7350K consumes about 29.52W during this workload, with the overclock growing power consumption to 49.2W. The 7350K appears to be less power hungry than the R3 1300X as of now.
R3 1300X Power Consumption – FireStrike Physics
A FireStrike Physics test shows us some gaming workloads, placing the 7350K at 22W, the 1300X at 38W consumption, with the overclocked 7350K at 39.4W when on a 1.35v Vcore. The 1300X pushes to 47W when overclocked.
R3 1300X Power Consumption – 3DMark FireStrike Demo Frozen
R3 1300X Power Consumption – Total War: Warhammer
Total War: Warhammer is our real gaming workload. The 7350K pulls 23W to run this game, with the 1300X at 42W stock. Overclocking each increases their power consumption metrics to 54W on the 1300X and 58W on the 7350K.
R3 1300X Power Consumption – Prime95 28.5 LFFTs
With Prime95 LFFTs, we observed a power consumption of 39W on the 7350K and 56.6W on the R3 1300X, with the overclocked counterparts at 59W and 64W, respectively.
R3 1300X Power Consumption – Prime95 29.2 8x8 FFTs
R3 1300X Stock Cooler Thermals – AMD Stealth
We’ve also completely overhauled our thermal testing for CPUs, so this one starts out just with the stock cooler performance. This endeavor of overhauling power and thermals is a hand-in-hand effort and will take time (read: CPU launches) to stack data. We’re expanding this for a feature piece soon, including the previously promised X299 thermal piece. Note also that we ran all of our actual testing with the standard X62 that we always use, so no thermal throttling occurred.
As for the stock cooler, operating temperature landed at 59.3C when executing a Blender workload with the stock configuration and max fan speed – definitely up there. Prime95 29.2 with 8K sizes burned at 74C, which is rapidly approaching the 85C shutdown threshold that we encountered when running the stock cooler with our overclock.
Here’s a look at power consumption over time, temperatures, and power leakage with the stock cooler:
