Running Ice Lake Out In The Cold - Intel Core i7-1065G7

For looking at any difference in thermal throttling and peak frequencies, I ran the Dell XPS with Intel Core i7-1065G7 "Ice Lake" processor out in a cold garage overnight compared to normal operating temperatures inside across dozens of benchmarks.

The latest in our Intel Ice Lake Linux testing was looking at whether the Dell XPS 7390 with Core i7-1065G7 would operate measurably better if running outdoors (inside a garage) overnight where the temperature ranged from 40~50 degrees Fahrenheit (4 ~ 10 C) compared to the results indoors for the same system when the ambient temperature was 70F / 21C.

Ubuntu 19.10 was running on the Dell laptop during this round of benchmarking. Via the Phoronix Test Suite dozens of single and multi-threaded workloads were carried out while our open-source benchmarking software was also monitoring the peak CPU frequency and CPU core temperature on a per-second basis.

Running the Ice Lake laptop in the colder environment certainly helped with the CPU temperature... Under load the i7-1065G7 now had an average temperature of 52 degrees rather than 61 degrees when indoors. The idle temperature was also lower at 21C versus 33C. The peak temperature also now was only 96 degrees rather than striking 100C according to the Linux coretemp driver.

For the most part, the peak CPU frequency wasn't too affected by the temperature difference. For some tests it did mean the ability to hit a higher frequency for longer periods of time, but for the most part the peak CPU frequencies were similar.


The performance for most of the tests turned out to be the same.



Most differences were extremely minor. While no significantly different results, those wanting to dig through more of this Core i7 1065G7 benchmark data can find this comparison over on OpenBenchmarking.org.