Total System Power Consumption

One of the debates revolving around the top-end Intel Core i9 processors has been how their power consumption and cooling requirements go through the roof when you overclock them. They will post and run at unfeasibly high frequencies, but no cooling system can keep the thermals under control, and the associated Wattage is astronomical as well. This is why Armari chose a relatively conservative 3.8GHz for the overclock of its Core i9 7980XE, where the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X could go a little higher to 4GHz. In a professional environment, you need guaranteed stability, so components must be configured to run at 100 per cent for hours or even days on end without falling over.

We wanted to test the relative system power consumption of the two workstations, so we plugged each one into a mains power meter, which records various details of electrical behaviour. In particular, we wanted to see approximately where the system settled when idle, and then when running the CPU at 100 per cent load. We ran the Blender Gooseberry Production Benchmark again and used our mains power meter to give us a maximum power consumption reading.

Both systems are fairly similar when idle, with the AMD system just a couple of Watts less. Under load, the Intel system consumes 3 per cent less power. That's not a huge difference, but you are also getting through the render faster on the Intel system so this is a win for the Core i9 7980XE.

Acoustics

We took an average noise reading during the Blender Gooseberry Production Benchmark render. Note this is a room noise reading, as we don't have an anechoic chamber available. The power meter was held at 1m from the rear of the systems, where most of the noise comes from.

Unsurprisingly, with the same chassis and same water cooling system, both systems produce similar amounts of noise under load. The Threadripper's average noise of 52dB is not particularly quiet, but it's not deafening either. The Intel system is only a few dB louder, although this is just about noticeable. When you consider how many cores both these systems have and how much multi-threaded CPU power they can deliver, they're not really sonic nuisances.

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