Power Consumption & Thermal Testing With The Core i9 7900X On Linux

And a look at things when just keeping the GPU very busy with Unigine Superposition while the CPUs don't have too much work going on.

Here's a look at the CPU thermal data over the duration of all the benchmarks run. The Core i9 7900X actually panned out fine for air cooling with the Arctic Freezer i11 and Noctua NH-D9L heatsinks while the system was running in a Rosewill 4U chassis. The average temperatures were similar while the Noctua heatsink did a better job keeping the peak temperatures lower. Only during the most extreme tests (e.g. parallel Linux kernel compilation) was the Skylake-X system hitting 80~90C. This Noctua heatsink I am very pleased with and sits comfortably in 3U/4U cases, the only downside is the cost at over $50 USD compared to ~$20 USD on the Freezer i11.

Lastly a look at the overall AC system power consumption during all of the benchmarks run. Overall, the Core i9 7900X had an average power use of 166 Watts compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X at 146 Watts and the Core i7 7700K coming in at 125 Watts. The peak power use was much greater at 307 Watts for the i9-7900X and the 237 Watts for the Ryzen 7 1800X and the i7-7700K at only 223 Watts.