Intel Core i9-10850K

[Zhaoman]

Are you suggesting that somehow 14nm Intel cores draw less power than 7nm AMD cores at any given frequency? Higher Frame-rates would, if anything, result in more power being consumed by the GPU, and have little effect on CPU utilisation, given that it is the GPU doing most of the heavy lifting in gaming.
My point is that publishing meaningful benchmarks requires a level playing field across different products as much as possible. Anything else is meaningless waffle. As is obfuscation.

Not disagreeing with your initial point but I think what Kalniel was referring to is if GPU utilisation is locked at 100% then CPU utilisation will go up at 1080p compared with 4K since there are more frames to process. The power chart tells us no relevant info in this regard so we can't be sure what is going on. Perhaps they tested at 8K and the game was crawling along at 15fps and all CPUs ended up drawing the same power with low utilisation... I don't know but it's not a very informative chart anyway.

[kalniel]

Are you suggesting that somehow 14nm Intel cores draw less power than 7nm AMD cores at any given frequency?

No, and nor is the chart.

It makes no reference to what frequency/load the CPU is under. Also it's quite possible to run a lightly loaded CPU at max frequency while cutting the volts to save power - I see this all the time with my i9 where some small background tasks kick the frequency up to 5ghz but the voltage stays low until it's loaded enough to need it.

Higher Frame-rates would, if anything, result in more power being consumed by the GPU, and have little effect on CPU utilisation, given that it is the GPU doing most of the heavy lifting in gaming.

Well we don't know what the frame rates are either so we can't make any conclusion there either.

My point is that publishing meaningful benchmarks requires a level playing field across different products as much as possible. Anything else is meaningless waffle. As is obfuscation.

How would you level the playing field though? Would you say 'what is the power required to run this game at 60fps and 1080p?' or would you say 'what is the power required to run this game as fast as it will go on high settings at 4k?' If the former, then you might find out that a 14nm chip doesn't draw any more than a 7nm (even allowing for lack of comparability between processes from different foundries) if it happens to be faster and therefore spends more time at idle.

Not to mention power draw of motherboards and associated chipsets - PCIe 4 controllers aren't as efficient as PCIe 3 for eg.

[ohmaheid]

No, and nor is the chart.

It makes no reference to what frequency/load the CPU is under. Also it's quite possible to run a lightly loaded CPU at max frequency while cutting the volts to save power - I see this all the time with my i9 where some small background tasks kick the frequency up to 5ghz but the voltage stays low until it's loaded enough to need it.

Well we don't know what the frame rates are either so we can't make any conclusion there either.

How would you level the playing field though? Would you say 'what is the power required to run this game at 60fps and 1080p?' or would you say 'what is the power required to run this game as fast as it will go on high settings at 4k?' If the former, then you might find out that a 14nm chip doesn't draw any more than a 7nm (even allowing for lack of comparability between processes from different foundries) if it happens to be faster and therefore spends more time at idle.

Not to mention power draw of motherboards and associated chipsets - PCIe 4 controllers aren't as efficient as PCIe 3 for eg.

See what I mean by obfuscation....

[Stu C]

"now is not a great time to invest in older technology unless you find it at bargain basement prices."


Well, you could argue the Ryzen 5xxx CPU's are now 'older technology' seeing as they're the last AM4 socket CPU's we'll see, with no further upgrades possible.

For people dropping them into an existing Ryzen build, that shouldn't matter, it will be a nice 'last hurrah' upgrade, but for anyone wanting to build a Ryzen rig from the ground up, an EOL socket wouldn't make much sense.

More of a problem for the 6 & 8 core parts than the 12 & 16 though, seeing as they will have all the multi-core power you'll need for many years.

I don't think we'll see the next AMD socket on shelves until 2022... if you want to build a new Ryzen rig from the ground up now, the new chips offer plenty of performance, and are available now. I think the new platform, and DDR5, will cost significantly more in the first year, which is a real factor to those of us without bottomless pockets.

[kalniel]

See what I mean by obfuscation....

So how would you test power while gaming to ensure a level playing field?

[kompukare]

The platform power draw charts are ridiculous.
R3 3300, with 4 cores and 8 threads pulls more at the wall than the
10850k with 10 cores and 20 threads.
SERIOUSLY??

Nexus needs to look again at its testing methodology.
Makes you start to wonder what other BS is being presented here.

Yet TPU got very similar figures.
For certain games which aren't that heavily threaded (or whose built-in benchmark isn't), platform consumption can make a huge difference. Mobo group tests are rare, but the difference can be 10W or so. Plus the PCIe 4.0 versus 3.0 power difference, the slower RAM. A watt or so here and there soon add up in a test which is mainly GPU.

[lumireleon]

.............."I see this all the time with my i9 where some small background tasks kick the frequency up to 5ghz but the voltage stays low until it's loaded enough to need it".........there goes the answer. If a cpu is optimised to do a certain task really well it will consume less power doing that task. This opens a rabbit hole that AMD had issues with (previously) like memory latency and infinity fabric.

[ohmaheid]

.............."I see this all the time with my i9 where some small background tasks kick the frequency up to 5ghz but the voltage stays low until it's loaded enough to need it".........there goes the answer. If a cpu is optimised to do a certain task really well it will consume less power doing that task. This opens a rabbit hole that AMD had issues with (previously) like memory latency and infinity fabric.

That explains it then. The MAGIC Intel boost to 5ghz with lower voltage.
Just LOL.