2 ms·

I just tested my 7900x yesterday and it gets about 95% of the max performance at 105W TDP. The system idles at half the wattage, too—so it's saving a ton of en

• 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  Have you tested draw from the outlet? I assumed that modern chips could scale down their power usage significantly when idle. Which is to say I thought consumers would rarely ever hit maximum power draw, so I would expect really modest real-world savings. Happy to be proven wrong, because it is a brilliant idea. My machine is wildly oversized for my typical usage, and I could easily take a 10%+ performance haircut and likely would not even notice.
  • trashtester 4y ago
    That's part of the reason they're given such a high TDP by default. The cost of squeezing out the last 5-15% may be worth it if it for short periods of time. But if you use these chips for tasks that max out all cores for several hours per day, it may be better the simply run a chip with more cores and to run those in econ mode. A 7950X@64W may perform as well as a 7900X@200W for such compute tasks, and are probably cheaper over time. And if you use it in your house, they generate less noise, can use a cheaper cooler and doesn't dump so much heat into your room.
    • 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
      Thanks for the thoughts. My untested suspicion is that my CPU hits max load for <5% of total use. Meaning lowering max TDP is unlikely to noticeably impact my electrical bill, but it’s such a cheap optimization to enable, why not?