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

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 29 June 2017 at 10:50 AM EDT. Page 2 of 6. 19 Comments.

First I warmed up the i9-7900X by running the timed kernel compilation process.

Core i7 7700K vs. Ryzen 7 1800X vs. Core i9 7900X Linux Power + Thermal

The Core i9 7900X could do a default x86-64 Linux kernel build in just 50 seconds while the Ryzen 7 1800X came in at 81 seconds and the i7-7700K at 103 seconds.

Core i7 7700K vs. Ryzen 7 1800X vs. Core i9 7900X Linux Power + Thermal

Again, no CPU temperature readings on the Ryzen 7 since AMD still hasn't updated their Linux thermal driver for handling Ryzen. The Core i9 7900X with the Freezer i11 had an average temp of 69C with this air cooling in the Rosewill 4U chassis. The Noctua NH-D9L meanwhile had an average temp of 84C. During this testing the peak temperature with the Noctua heatsink was 84 degrees while the i11 got up to 93C briefly. During this testing, the runs with both heatsinks had the same results so there didn't appear to be any thermal throttling difference when testing these different heatsinks.

Core i7 7700K vs. Ryzen 7 1800X vs. Core i9 7900X Linux Power + Thermal

The Core i9 7900X during this benchmarking process had an average power draw of 234 Watts with a peak of 307 Watts, compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X coming in at 172 Watts and a peak of 188 Watts or the i7-7700K at 133 Watts with a peak of 158 Watts.

Core i7 7700K vs. Ryzen 7 1800X vs. Core i9 7900X Linux Power + Thermal

The i9-7900X comes just ahead of the i7-7700K for the Himeno pressure solver that isn't multi-threaded, thus the only small difference in performance.

Core i7 7700K vs. Ryzen 7 1800X vs. Core i9 7900X Linux Power + Thermal

With not making use of all the cores, the CPU temperatures were low.

Core i7 7700K vs. Ryzen 7 1800X vs. Core i9 7900X Linux Power + Thermal

While the i9-7900X had an average power use of 116 Watts while the Ryzen 7 was at 98 Watts and the i7-7700K at 81 Watts.

Core i7 7700K vs. Ryzen 7 1800X vs. Core i9 7900X Linux Power + Thermal

In this case, the i7-7700K offered better performance-per-Watt than the i9-7900X for this single-threaded test while it still came out ahead of the Ryzen 7 with this workload not running so well on Zen.


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