# Intel Core i9-12900K Alder Lake Tested at Power Limits between 50 W and 241 W



## W1zzard (Dec 8, 2021)

We test Intel's Core i9-12900K at various TDP levels all the way down to 50 W to determine how much efficiency is really in the new Alder Lake core, and how these power limits affect performance. Competing with the efficiency of AMD's Zen 3 Ryzen lineup is just two settings changes away.

*Show full review*


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## Vecix6 (Dec 8, 2021)

Interesting info... But difficult to compare against Zen 3 without manual power adjust...

Mmm... Probably a typo at page 9, 4th paragraph:



> Had they used the classic PL1=241, PL2=125 setting, then Core i9-12900K would end up significantly slower in reviews.



It would be PL1=125, PL2=241, no?

Sorry if there is another easier way to summit this kind of mistakes.


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## AusWolf (Dec 8, 2021)

Awesome test, thank you! 

It shows exactly my point when I straight away dismiss claims saying "Intel is inefficient and runs hot". With custom PL settings, it's as efficient as the user wants it do be. Dropping PL values to reasonable levels gives the user a barely noticeable difference in observable performance, but a huge gain in efficiency and heat output. Reading reviewers that only test at maxed out power limits gives a one-sided and unrealistic picture.


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## Wirko (Dec 8, 2021)

The effect of setting the lowest power limit of 50W is actually similar to what you get when you enable E-cores only.

Does the CPU become more inclined to put load on E-cores when it's squeezed by a low power limit?


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## Metroid (Dec 8, 2021)

Incredible tests, the 12900k 100w mode is pretty good however in all tests 5900x was better overall with the same 100w. These tests showed that AMD 5900x at 100w is better than Intel 12900k at 100w.


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## Imsochobo (Dec 8, 2021)

If they did 190 or 215 W or so, it would be so much better looking.
Just stupidity, makes the 12700K look so much more attractive.


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## Minus Infinity (Dec 8, 2021)

I'd probably run something like a PL1 = 175W, PL2 = 225W  split and you be probably at 98% of PL1=PL2=241W and a tad faster than the 190/190 split.

Any way great test and I'm really looking forward to Rocket Lake which will see significant improvements in power efficiency, IPC uplifts and up to 2x the Gracemont cores. Zen 4 and Zen 4c (Bergamo) though will provide much stiffer competition than Zen 3 or Zen 3+.


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## AlwaysHope (Dec 9, 2021)

Isn't the i9-12900k stock settings with its IMC only officially support DDR5-4800? Curiously, why did the test setup go with DDR5-6000? This was also the case with i9-12900k review. 
I know this is a review about power consumption, but just pointing that out as I think the benchmark results will be influenced by this.


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## Selaya (Dec 9, 2021)

Very enlightening.
Honestly, the 12900K'd have been a _much better_ product at 190W - losing 2% of performance for significantly more accessible cooling/VRM requirement's a great deal tbh.


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## Camm (Dec 9, 2021)

BRB, setting P states to 125w and moving on with my life.


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## Fouquin (Dec 9, 2021)

Yikes Intel... Stretching the TDP nearly 50% for a 5% gain. Giving me Presler flashbacks.


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## Crackong (Dec 9, 2021)

Nice article as usual.



> Some might even say Intel switched to PL1=PL2=241 W only to beat AMD's Zen 3 Ryzen processors in Cinebench.



That pretty much matches the reality.


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## Rowsol (Dec 9, 2021)

It's interesting seeing the efficiency chart show a sweet spot of 75-100w. Surprised to see 50w rated worse.


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## Lightofhonor (Dec 9, 2021)

Crazy to see it never matches 5950X efficiency, even at 50-75W.


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## KaitouX (Dec 9, 2021)

AusWolf said:


> Awesome test, thank you!
> 
> It shows exactly my point when I straight away dismiss claims saying "Intel is inefficient and runs hot". With custom PL settings, it's as efficient as the user wants it do be. Dropping PL values to reasonable levels gives the user a barely noticeable difference in observable performance, but a huge gain in efficiency and heat output. Reading reviewers that only test at maxed out power limits gives a one-sided and unrealistic picture.


But you can also drop the PL with Ryzen CPUs, which would make at least the "Intel is inefficient" part continue to be true when compared to current AMD offerings. Testing at maxed out power limits isn't unrealistic when it's the default behavior in many cases, by using your argument, you could argue that the 5800X reviews were unrealistic as you could activate the Eco mode and show a much cooler and efficient CPU, but that isn't the default performance and neither is what most buyers are going to do with it. While I would love to see more reviews caring more about efficiency tweaks over overclocking, most people don't care about it.  


Based on ComputerBase testing of the Eco mode on the 5900X and 5800X, they can achieve ~25%+ lower power consumption(150W at eco, 200 at stock, both measured at the wall) with ~8% performance loss, while the 5950X with the eco mode performed the same as a stock 5900X, losing 20% performance compared to stock, making it only slightly more efficient than the 5900X in Eco mode. The 5600X barely changes anything, only lowers the power consumption by 10W while performing basically the same as stock.
Would be interesting to see similar tests with other CPUs, maybe the i7 would benefit more from it, just like the 5900X and 5800X benefit more from the eco mode?


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## watzupken (Dec 9, 2021)

I think this review concludes that Intel threw power efficiency out of the window in their quest to take back their single core performance crown. The Golden Cove is actually a very good step up when it comes to IPC improvements, but because they are pushed so hard in terms of clock speed, they are burning through too much power to get there. Therefore, if anyone wants to get an Alder Lake, I think it makes sense to avoid i9 12900 series. The bulk of the processing power comes from the P-Cores, so I don't see why I want to spend so much for an extra 4 E-Cores, and a chip that guzzles power for a couple of hundred Mhz more.



AusWolf said:


> Awesome test, thank you!
> 
> It shows exactly my point when I straight away dismiss claims saying "Intel is inefficient and runs hot". With custom PL settings, it's as efficient as the user wants it do be. Dropping PL values to reasonable levels gives the user a barely noticeable difference in observable performance, but a huge gain in efficiency and heat output. Reading reviewers that only test at maxed out power limits gives a one-sided and unrealistic picture.


Reviewers tend to test the product as is, i.e. recommended/ out of the box settings for the product. If Intel have changed the way the PL1 and 2 works, then it makes sense that it is tested as is, i.e. running at PL2 indefinitely as long as the cooler can maintain the temps below the threshold. And out of the box, the i9 12900K is factually a very power hungry product. So I don't think there is anything wrong with the testing. Only power users will go in and tweak the settings to make it more power efficient, and how many % of people buying an Intel Alder Lake CPU will be going into the BIOS to tweak it? In OEM machines, that option to tweak power limit may not even be available. So I don't think the general consensus from review sites paints an unrealistic picture.


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## Selaya (Dec 9, 2021)

no, the power efficiency is quite irrelevant for 1T, they threw out power efficiency for their (failed) attempt on nT perf ... (also why E-cores exist but yea)


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## chrcoluk (Dec 9, 2021)

125w the sweet spot then.

above that the efficiency collapses.


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## Selaya (Dec 9, 2021)

chrcoluk said:


> 125w the sweet spot then.
> 
> above that the efficiency collapses.


no, that's definitely not true. Intel's efficiency curve doesn't plummet until like 150-180W.


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## Mussels (Dec 9, 2021)

This reminds me so much of what AMD did with the 5800x - gave it a PPT of 142W, and let it burn at 90C to win cinebench runs.
Cap it to ~120W and suddenly you're 30C lower for 1-2% less performance


125W seems to be the best middle ground to me as well, maybe 150W (which was not tested) would give the best of everything (And in that case, using very similar wattages to the high end ryzens eliminating the complaints about higher cooling needs)


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 9, 2021)

Thanks for this test, very illuminating. To be honest, I thought the 12900K would have had even better overall processing efficiency at lower power limits, but the result was not as good as I imagined it would be.

To reach or beat the 5950X in this regard, Alder Lake will likely also need 16 cores / 32 threads clocked at relatively low speeds (in multithread) and probably good binning.


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## InVasMani (Dec 9, 2021)

I'd like to see if 60w PL1/PL2 would improve the efficiency results over the 75W PL1/PL2. It might be a better sweet spot a nudge higher due to some vdroop though I'm not sure speculation really. Is the 50W results a case of PL1/PL2 falling below nominal voltage!?



Selaya said:


> no, that's definitely not true. Intel's efficiency curve doesn't plummet until like 150-180W.


Far as I can tell it's about 120W to 180W PL2 where it really nose dives hard on efficiency in exchange for minor performance for maximum turbo power while 60W to 120W is ideal sweet spot range for the PL1 base power. Basically about 1/4 between min/max of the nominal which is 120W however with two processors and a base and turbo PL it's a little complex. That's my take away at least based on what I see of the results to glee from. It would be a bit easier to get a stronger idea certain with a little more testing to see if it holds true more or less.

This pretty much falls closely in line with what I felt all along with big LITTLE when Intel first announced they'd be taking such a chip approach and people were like whoa no little oh hell no I want more big cores that consume 8000W for 2% performance gains.


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## Yraggul666 (Dec 9, 2021)

Thank you so much for this test! 
In my ignorance i had no idea that as a user you were given control of PL1 and PL2;
but in my defense who expected Intel to ever do that?
Ahhh! I LOVE THE COMPETITION!!!!!!


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 9, 2021)

InVasMani said:


> I'd like to see if 60w PL1/PL2 would improve the efficiency results over the 75W PL1/PL2. It might be a better sweet spot a nudge higher due to some vdroop though I'm not sure speculation really. Is the 50W results a case of PL1/PL2 falling below nominal voltage!?



I think efficiency can improve as long as the frequency can be decreased, but by default the CPU won't normally try to decrease frequency below the "base clock" to obey the PL1 setting. The base clock should be configurable in BIOS, however.

By the way: on Rocket Lake strange throttling behavior can occur if PL1=PL2, and both are set to a low level which would make frequency decrease below the base clock. At least this is what I observed on my i9-11900 (non-k).


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## W1zzard (Dec 9, 2021)

Vecix6 said:


> It would be PL1=125, PL2=241, no?
> 
> Sorry if there is another easier way to summit this kind of mistakes.


Fixed, this is the easiest way and perfectly fine. You may also contact me through any other means



AusWolf said:


> Reading reviewers that only test at maxed out power limits gives a one-sided and unrealistic picture.


Intel made it clear several times that this is the way the product is intended to be used.



Wirko said:


> Does the CPU become more inclined to put load on E-cores when it's squeezed by a low power limit?


Doubt it, but will test to verify



AlwaysHope said:


> Isn't the i9-12900k stock settings with its IMC only officially support DDR5-4800? Curiously, why did the test setup go with DDR5-6000? This was also the case with i9-12900k review.


The official memory spec is always too low. Intel supports DDR4 at 3200, which nobody who's serious runs at, so I try to pick a reasonable config that people like us run (DDR4-3600 CL16 1T). In hindsight I have to admit DDR5-6000 is a bit high, but it was the kit GSKILL offered when not much was known about DDR5 choices, options and supply. 



watzupken said:


> I think this review concludes that Intel threw power efficiency out of the window in their quest to take back their single core performance crown.


Multi-core, not single-core. Check SuperPi or MP3, no difference between power limits there



Yraggul666 said:


> that as a user you were given control of PL1 and PL2;


That's the most important dial nowadays, especially on non-K models. Your cooler can't handle the heat? Just dial down the power limit a bit--no need to manually change the clocks. It will boost as high as it can, always 100% stable, and once it hits the power limit it will reduce clocks to stay within that limit. Thanks to Throttlestop this works on every system, including laptops and OEM boxes


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## BSim500 (Dec 9, 2021)

W1zzard said:


> Doubt it, but will test to verify


I'm really not in the market for a new CPU, but I just want to say I love the battery of in-depth tests TPU has been doing recently plus the level of communication with your readers that puts other sites to shame.


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## bobmeix (Dec 9, 2021)

Great review, but these graphs seem to contradict the values from the 1080p page of the game tests, where the average values are much less divergent.


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## bug (Dec 9, 2021)

I was going to limit my 12600k (when I'll be able to get the mobo), this shows you can shave off the last 50W with basically no impact whatsoever. I'm going to look into setting PL1 even lower than 190W. Despite the first page saying for AL PL1=PL2 and tau=infinite, there's clearly a difference when running PL1 != PL2.


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 9, 2021)

Solid State Brain said:


> By the way: on Rocket Lake strange throttling behavior can occur if PL1=PL2, and both are set to a low level which would make frequency decrease below the base clock. At least this is what I observed on my i9-11900 (non-k).



I thought it might be worth demonstrating this behavior during a Blender 3D render;  it could potentially be affecting this i9-12900K TDP review to some extent. After revisiting it, perhaps it is not strictly related to the base clock like I initially wrote, but it needs more testing to make sure. It does seem to occur mainly at low power limit settings.

PL1=PL2=65W, Tau=1s, reported package power = 65W. See how unstable core clocks are, varying randomly between base clock (2.5 GHz in my case) and some higher clock:



PL1=65W, PL2=85W, Tau=1s, reported package power = 65W. Core clocks are now stable. PC power consumption at the wall is also a few watts _lower_ (not shown here):


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## bug (Dec 9, 2021)

Solid State Brain said:


> I thought it might be worth demonstrating this behavior during a Blender 3D render;  it could potentially be affecting this i9-12900K TDP review to some extent. After revisiting it, perhaps it is not strictly related to the base clock like I initially wrote, but it needs more testing to make sure. It does seem to occur mainly at low power limit settings.
> 
> PL1=PL2=65W, Tau=1s, reported package power = 65W. See how unstable core clocks are, varying randomly between base clock (2.5 GHz in my case) and some higher clock:
> 
> ...


Interesting, can you test the first scenario after enabling clamp for PL1, too? I suspect that despite clamp being enabled for PL2, the PL1 setting somehow overrides that.


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## InVasMani (Dec 9, 2021)

W1zzard said:


> Intel made it clear several times that this is the way the product is intended to be used.



Intel has chosen to kind of market it as a performance leading chip at all costs TDP be damned. I do think AusWolf makes a alright point though TPU has covered Alder Lake in quite a bit of depth. It seems like every time I turn around there is another article on it covering it further.

I feel what comes next with big LITTLE will be great based on how Alder Lake has turned out. I believe it will mature like fine wine much the way Ryzen has evolved over time. I don't see CPU innovation and competition slowing in a hurry. It seems like the next 5 years or beyond we'll see plenty of strong CPU competition.



Solid State Brain said:


> I thought it might be worth demonstrating this behavior during a Blender 3D render;  it could potentially be affecting this i9-12900K TDP review to some extent. After revisiting it, perhaps it is not strictly related to the base clock like I initially wrote, but it needs more testing to make sure. It does seem to occur mainly at low power limit settings.
> 
> PL1=PL2=65W, Tau=1s, reported package power = 65W. See how unstable core clocks are, varying randomly between base clock (2.5 GHz in my case) and some higher clock:
> 
> ...



The CPU utilization on the top looks very reminiscent of the way baud rate. One encouraging thing about that is it looks like speed step is pretty quick, but yeah that utilization is just all over the place. You might try tinkering with speed shift bumping up the minimum in throttlestop and see what happens. That might make it more consistent. Try setting the minimum to 44 with 52 max on speed shift and re-test just to see what happens in terms of utilization.


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 9, 2021)

bug said:


> Interesting, can you test the first scenario after enabling clamp for PL1, too? I suspect that despite clamp being enabled for PL2, the PL1 setting somehow overrides that.


Unexpectedly, similar behavior. Depending on load conditions, clocks may spontaneously stabilize afterwards, but by setting first PL1=PL2=low and only then starting a high-load multithreaded benchmark, clocks can reliably be made unstable for prolonged periods of time.


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## londiste (Dec 9, 2021)

@W1zzard, any plans to do head-to-head comparisons with Zen3? P-cores only at 88W/141W to match 5800X?


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 9, 2021)

InVasMani said:


> The CPU utilization on the top looks very reminiscent of the way baud rate. One encouraging thing about that is it looks like speed step is pretty quick, but yeah that utilization is just all over the place.



I think the behavior with PL1=PL2 might be undefined, and the CPU's power throttling algorithms might have some internal processing delay that can cause core clocks to be unstable at low power limits, when set that way.

To be sure that the low-power results in this review are correct, it would be probably best to check if the same occurs also on Alder Lake, but I think the best way to mitigate the issue is setting PL2 to a slightly higher level than PL1 and setting Tau to a very short time (EDIT: for example 1 second or something less. If it's much shorter than this, similar problems start occurring again).



InVasMani said:


> You might try tinkering with speed shift bumping up the minimum in throttlestop and see what happens. That might make it more consistent. Try setting the minimum to 44 with 52 max on speed shift and re-test just to see what happens in terms of utilization.



No change, it seems.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Dec 9, 2021)

AusWolf said:


> Awesome test, thank you!
> 
> It shows exactly my point when I straight away dismiss claims saying "Intel is inefficient and runs hot". With custom PL settings, it's as efficient as the user wants it do be. Dropping PL values to reasonable levels gives the user a barely noticeable difference in observable performance, but a huge gain in efficiency and heat output. Reading reviewers that only test at *Stock* out power limits gives a one-sided and unrealistic picture.


Fixed that for you.


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## InVasMani (Dec 9, 2021)

Solid State Brain said:


> I think the behavior with PL1=PL2 might be undefined, and the CPU's power throttling algorithms might have some internal processing delay that can cause core clocks to be unstable at low power limits, when set that way.
> 
> To be sure that the low-power results in this review are correct, it would be probably best to check if the same occurs also on Alder Lake, but I think the best way to mitigate the issue is setting PL2 to a slightly higher level than PL1 and setting Tau to a very short time (EDIT: for example 1 second or something less. If it's much shorter than this, similar problems start occurring again).
> 
> ...


Looked more stable in the first screenshot. What about if you turn off speed shift? Strange scenario I'll give you that if only it sounded as sexy as it looks like a EDM music LFO automation. Is this a big issue with Rocket Lake or can you just bump up PL2 to like 66W or something and it works fine and just a strange bug you encountered!?

So this PL1/PL2 situation with Alder Lake this raises a good question in regard to Intel do you think they'll add a few more stage of PL settings beyond the two in the near future!? I feel like they could double them with a PL1 and PL2 for both E core and P core designs to control and dial in base and boost TDP's on each core type.

Do these power limits have any impact on the IMC!!?? Like can you limit them and get better IMC performance/stability perhaps by throttling the CPU a bit intentionally!? I can't help wonder can they help any with either pushing Gear 1 performance higher or better memory stability and frequency support perhaps out of populating all four DIMM slots for example. It's sort of a shot in the dark I suppose, but wouldn't hurt to try. Explore all possibilities I believe is the saying.

On another note and one that could have a impact on high TDP CPU's I've been considering and pondering a kind of a innovative take on cooling which I haven't seen tested and explored. It may work and prove useful and be good in practice on some of these newer more densely packed harder to cool CPU's at the same time. I spoke briefly about it once earlier in a thread, but I don't know if anyone actually saw or read about it.

So my thoughts were what if you paired a Noctua NH-D15 heatsink tower cooler and in between where the heatpipes connect to a flat base what if you adhere and mounted a water cooler block to it!!? Then run it to a radiator up to!? Any thoughts on how it might impact temperature do you think it would transfer heat well enough to the water block mounted on it and could then transfer that to the radiator!!? Now say it can you could go further with have it run from one pump to another Noctua NH-D15 mounted somewhere else so two water pump blocks and two Noctua NH-D15 heatpipe tower coolers in place of a radiator essentially.

You could even include radiators though to be fair as well actually if utilizing two or more water block pumps w/o really slowing down the water flow if you manage the line lengths in smart way it might even increase the water flow. It comes down to how far the line lengths are essentially. In the case of skipping the radiators entirely it would be pump to pump and be like two network adapters with teaming in terms of the water flow increasing the pumping power between two Noctua NH-D15 cooler's one directly mounted to the CPU the other mounted wherever you feel like CD-Rom bay perhaps?

So anyway thought I'd share that hypothetical cooling idea. I haven't seen anyone do it or consider such a approach off hand so I'm really curious. What's really interesting about it is it could be nice and silent. It could be dead silent in fact outside of pump noise or put your fans on the heatpipe tower's and basically double down with a bit of water cooling heat exchange transferring between them in sort of a NIC teaming inspired manner of speaking.


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 9, 2021)

@InVasMani : SpeedShift was not enabled when first I observed and reported this strange behavior. It is not a big issue in practice, since in most cases, including low-power devices, PL2 will be typically set to a higher level than PL1 (even if just for a few seconds or less) and if PL2 is larger than PL1 the bug does not show up.

It is only an issue if you want to limit power to a specific level for benchmarking purposes; then, you have to make sure that with PL1=PL2 the CPU is operating correctly, otherwise performance and system power consumption might not be consistent with the reported package power.


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## Wirko (Dec 9, 2021)

Rowsol said:


> It's interesting seeing the efficiency chart show a sweet spot of 75-100w. Surprised to see 50w rated worse.


At 50W, the processors seems really pushed out of its comfort zone - I mean, the range in which it can adapt efficiently to the limits imposed.

Given how hairy the frametime graphs become at 50W, I'd even suspect that some throttling occurs, not for thermal reasons but to save power.

Edit: Seeing @Solid State Brain 's measurements, I'd rather say "even more throttling" than "some throttling".


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## bug (Dec 9, 2021)

londiste said:


> @W1zzard, any plans to do head-to-head comparisons with Zen3? P-cores only at 88W/141W to match 5800X?





> This is probably the last of our Alder Lake special investigation articles.


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## Vayra86 (Dec 9, 2021)

Great articles, I'm still surprised mostly at how 'all over the place' Alder Lake's performance really is.

Chart top and bottom all in one product, in any combination of metrics. It also shows how unnecessary it is, in the same way. You could get all this performance already for quite some time, and where it does offer more, you probably never needed it.

Intel should have marketed this with 125W peak, really, and not PL1=PL2 just to win synthetics.


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## bug (Dec 9, 2021)

Vayra86 said:


> Great articles, I'm still surprised mostly at how 'all over the place' Alder Lake's performance really is.
> 
> Chart top and bottom all in one product, in any combination of metrics. It also shows how unnecessary it is, in the same way. You could get all this performance already for quite some time, and where it does offer more, you probably never needed it.
> 
> Intel should have marketed this with 125W peak, really, and not PL1=PL2 just to win synthetics.


I agree with most of that, but AL is not unnecessary. Sure you could get that performance already, but now you can get it for cheaper (i.e. 12600k is a cheaper 5800X). As lesser models (and chipsets) hit the market, this will become more apparent.


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## Zubasa (Dec 9, 2021)

Mussels said:


> This reminds me so much of what AMD did with the 5800x - gave it a PPT of 142W, and let it burn at 90C to win cinebench runs.
> Cap it to ~120W and suddenly you're 30C lower for 1-2% less performance
> 
> 
> 125W seems to be the best middle ground to me as well, maybe 150W (which was not tested) would give the best of everything (And in that case, using very similar wattages to the high end ryzens eliminating the complaints about higher cooling needs)


You basically described the 5800 non-X for OEMs. That chip is one of the most efficient Desktop CPUs out there.


londiste said:


> @W1zzard, any plans to do head-to-head comparisons with Zen3? P-cores only at 88W/141W to match 5800X?


AMD pretty much did just that.


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## Raendor (Dec 9, 2021)

AusWolf said:


> Awesome test, thank you!
> 
> It shows exactly my point when I straight away dismiss claims saying "Intel is inefficient and runs hot". With custom PL settings, it's as efficient as the user wants it do be. Dropping PL values to reasonable levels gives the user a barely noticeable difference in observable performance, but a huge gain in efficiency and heat output. Reading reviewers that only test at maxed out power limits gives a one-sided and unrealistic picture.


My friend, exactly the same case here with majority of noobs or fanboys simply not understanding how PL1 and PL2 work and what those 240w meant for last 3-4 gens or so. They completely don’t realize how much efficiency can be gained from setting your limit based on what you use it and how little k processors offer for home usage.

I personally run my 11700 with 125/140 limits in itx Ncase on air (silver soul 135) with temps not going beyond mid 60s in cpu-tense games and simply laugh at all “inefficiency” talks amd fanboys are so keen on.


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## Vayra86 (Dec 9, 2021)

bug said:


> I agree with most of that, but AL is not unnecessary. Sure you could get that performance already, but now you can get it for cheaper (i.e. 12600k is a cheaper 5800X). As lesser models (and chipsets) hit the market, this will become more apparent.



Certainly, but I was mostly referring to how Alder Lake tries to muddy the waters with its PL1=PL2 nonsense, it has absolutely no practical advantage.

Competition wise, this is great.


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## Xebec (Dec 9, 2021)

Excellent article - I've been following TPU for years and years and finally decided to register   I really can't say enough about how much I love this website's data and testing methodologies - it's an extremely helpful reference.  

One question - will there be a follow-up discussing temps or anything like that for the various wattages run?  Temperature can affect the power used independently of the fact that power itself generates heat.   I'm just curious academically.  

An old 3770K, for example - can increase power usage by 20W just by running hotter - same voltage (1.359V), same clock speed (3.2 GHz), and same application test - the difference being 60C vs 100C operating temperatures.  This sort of implies even more scaling losses as you go higher in overall power usage.   Interestingly, at a much lower voltage - 0.923V for example, power seemed to only increase ~ 12-15W when the CPU went from ~ 40C to 100C (a wider band too).  

Sources:





						i7-3770K vs. i7-2600K: Temperature, Voltage, GHz and Power-Consumption Analysis
					

It has been just a little over a year now since I posted my deep-dive analysis of the dependence of power-consumption with temperature, clockspeed, and cpu voltage for my 32nm i7-2600K cpu (sandy bridge) and I felt like it would be a nice evolution to perform a similar analysis of my 22nm...




					forums.anandtech.com
				





			https://i272.photobucket.com/albums/jj163/idontcare_photo_bucket/Intel%20Core%20i7-3770K/i7-3770kat32GHzPowerConsumption.png


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## Ed_1 (Dec 9, 2021)

W1zzard: on the Wprime 1024M tests are you running the test with all threads enabled?
Cause my 12600k with a 16 thread count setting scores 79.911 sec

When I start Wprime 2.10 it defaults to 4 thread count.


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## HD64G (Dec 9, 2021)

Any chance of doing the same type of efficiency test with Ryzen 5900X or 5950X? That is even easier. Just needs changing the power limit from auto (142W) to 105W, and another step (75W  maybe?) or 2 down to tis lower limit @45W.


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## bug (Dec 9, 2021)

Vayra86 said:


> Certainly, but I was mostly referring to how Alder Lake tries to muddy the waters with its PL1=PL2 nonsense, it has absolutely no practical advantage.
> 
> Competition wise, this is great.


I concur to a degree, but honestly, mortals don't know what PL1 and PL2 are.
The only practical effect is these will run as hot as the cooler allows (reviews use high-end cooling, end users do not, typically) and thus rather loud. If Intel doesn't dial PL back in locked chips, these will end up next to Netburst in history.


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 9, 2021)

The issue I have with the default PL2 setting used until Rocket Lake, when it's intended to be much higher than PL1, is that the default Tau of 52 seconds (or even 28 seconds on lower SKUs) does not make much sense if the aim is just taking advantage of the thermal inertia of the cooler. After so many seconds at high power, temperature can easily increase close to the thermal limit, and fans will easily respond to that. For this mode of operation to make sense as claimed, PL2 would have to last just a few seconds.

A different way of using different PL1/PL2 advantageously is disregarding thermal inertia and setting PL2 to a high level so that short-term intense multithreaded loads can take place at full speed. Then, PL1 can be set to a low level after a Tau time of several _minutes_ for more efficient operation for long jobs (3D/video rendering, etc).

Default settings resemble more the second scenario, but then a 28s/56s Tau feels short for that.


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## dicktracy (Dec 9, 2021)

Just setting PL2 in the BIOS doesn’t help much since the CPU and motherboard will still use high voltages for no reason. Best method is setting PL2 at 241w and reducing the voltage via V/F and you’ll get same performance at around 170w CPU package in Cinebench. 27k multi points at 170w is efficient as hell.


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 9, 2021)

dicktracy said:


> Just setting PL2 in the BIOS doesn’t help much since the CPU and motherboard will still use high voltages for no reason. Best method is setting PL2 at 241w and reducing the voltage via V/F and you’ll get same performance at around 170w CPU package in Cinebench. 27k multi points at 170w is efficient as hell.



Motherboards sometimes actually already use lower CPU voltages than they should, to the point of instability during certain loads at high power levels. My Gigabyte Aorus B560M was one such cases. At normal or even moderately intense loads it was stable, but it quickly failed with intense benchmarks like Prime95 or Linpack, giving calculation errors, all at stock/default settings. The motherboard is fine; default settings were bad.

So, while you may find your voltage too high for typical loads, care must be taken to make sure that by lowering it stability is still maintained at all loads and also temperatures, at least if you value that.


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## pexxie (Dec 9, 2021)

Amazing. W1zzard is becoming the new Bill Nye.

Yeah, dropping those watts like that; it probably makes sense to disable cores, especially for max thread performance. I would keep an eye on the frequencies, and would want them all to be reaching max mhz. Although that's a thread perf optimization effort, not so much a for-science effort.


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## Garrus (Dec 9, 2021)

I should point out that not all motherboards perform properly with custom PL settings. I've had some boards cause the CPU to wildy swing up and down between frequencies instead of settling on lower frequencies. After building several computers for clients where I just set the PL limit to the cooler limit and told them similar things to this article, I ran in to a problem where the PL limit setting didn't work right with a motherboard and it put egg on my face, as a system builder. I still find it best to just manually tune a lower voltage and frequency for all cores instead of relying on the PL setting. 120W at 4.5ghz with an i7-12700k for example was possible with a custom voltage setting. Solved the client's problem.

If you are building an i9 or an i7 system, it is best to just buy a very expensive cooler instead. Noctua U12A for example. AMD has the advantage here in that you can use a Noctua U12 non A (such as Redux) with every CPU and it is just so much easier to build systems with AMD that my clients prefer it.


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## AusWolf (Dec 9, 2021)

watzupken said:


> Reviewers tend to test the product as is, i.e. recommended/ out of the box settings for the product. If Intel have changed the way the PL1 and 2 works, then it makes sense that it is tested as is, i.e. running at PL2 indefinitely as long as the cooler can maintain the temps below the threshold. And out of the box, the i9 12900K is factually a very power hungry product. So I don't think there is anything wrong with the testing. Only power users will go in and tweak the settings to make it more power efficient, and how many % of people buying an Intel Alder Lake CPU will be going into the BIOS to tweak it? In OEM machines, that option to tweak power limit may not even be available. So I don't think the general consensus from review sites paints an unrealistic picture.





W1zzard said:


> Intel made it clear several times that this is the way the product is intended to be used.





TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Fixed that for you.


Intended: maybe, stock: no. At least not for pre-12th gen.

I've dealt with a few 400 and 500 series motherboards, and they all default to Intel indicated TDP for PL limits, unless core enhancement / optimization is turned on. MSi has an option to toggle power limits to fit your cooling (air = Intel stock, high end and water = raised PL). My Asus TUF B560M-Plus treats my 11700 as a proper 65 W CPU locked to 65/228 W PL1/2 with a 28 s Tau. With "Asus optimizer" enabled, my PLs are 200/250 W. That is not stock. It's Asus's spec for this particular motherboard and CPU. Testing with such features enabled and calling it "default" is misleading.

Maybe it's changed for 12th gen, I don't know.

Anyway, great review.


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## KaitouX (Dec 9, 2021)

AusWolf said:


> Intended: maybe, stock: no. At least not for pre-12th gen.
> 
> I've dealt with a few 400 and 500 series motherboards, and they all default to Intel indicated TDP for PL limits, unless core enhancement / optimization is turned on. MSi has an option to toggle power limits to fit your cooling (air = Intel stock, high end and water = raised PL). My Asus TUF B560M-Plus treats my 11700 as a proper 65 W CPU locked to 65/228 W PL1/2 with a 28 s Tau. With "Asus optimizer" enabled, my PLs are 200/250 W. That is not stock. It's Asus's spec for this particular motherboard and CPU. Testing with such features enabled and calling it "default" is misleading.
> 
> ...


Many boards for the last few generations have MCE on by default, which throw power limits out of the window. I believe GN and HUB both already did videos on MCE being on by default.



Zubasa said:


> You basically described the 5800 non-X for OEMs. That chip is one of the most efficient Desktop CPUs out there.


I believe activating the Eco mode achieves about the same result, unfortunately it was ignored by most reviews. Even if it wasn't the center of the review, letting people know that you have the option would have been nice.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Dec 9, 2021)

AusWolf said:


> Intended: maybe, stock: no. At least not for pre-12th gen.
> 
> I've dealt with a few 400 and 500 series motherboards, and they all default to Intel indicated TDP for PL limits, unless core enhancement / optimization is turned on. MSi has an option to toggle power limits to fit your cooling (air = Intel stock, high end and water = raised PL). My Asus TUF B560M-Plus treats my 11700 as a proper 65 W CPU locked to 65/228 W PL1/2 with a 28 s Tau. With "Asus optimizer" enabled, my PLs are 200/250 W. That is not stock. It's Asus's spec for this particular motherboard and CPU. Testing with such features enabled and calling it "default" is misleading.
> 
> ...


We're not on about pre 12th gen, your deluded and rambling pal.
( Takes a look at thread Title) sigh I'll leave it but damn I'm tempted because , well just stop.


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## W1zzard (Dec 9, 2021)

AusWolf said:


> Intended: maybe, stock: no. At least not for pre-12th gen.


Before 12th gen the power limits were something like 125 W/250 W 56 seconds .. this has changed with Alder Lake to be PL1=PL2. This is the new default for Alder Lake, everything else is not spec, but Intel keeps adding "if you want to configure it differently you may do so"


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## Borc (Dec 9, 2021)

Unfortunately something is completely broken in this test, the 100W, 65W etc. scores are way too low. Much lower than any other scaling test.


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## AusWolf (Dec 9, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> We're not on about pre 12th gen, your deluded and rambling pal.
> ( Takes a look at thread Title) sigh I'll leave it but damn I'm tempted because , well just stop.


Instead of calling me delusional for not having any experience with a 12th gen Intel system, how about letting me know where I'm wrong? Something like this:



W1zzard said:


> Before 12th gen the power limits were something like 125 W/250 W 56 seconds .. this has changed with Alder Lake to be PL1=PL2. This is the new default for Alder Lake, everything else is not spec, but Intel keeps adding "if you want to configure it differently you may do so"


Thanks for clarifying this instead of attacking me for coming from a 10/11th gen point of view. This is the attitude we need more of on the forum.


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## Mussels (Dec 9, 2021)

londiste said:


> @W1zzard, any plans to do head-to-head comparisons with Zen3? P-cores only at 88W/141W to match 5800X?


That'd be interesting to do a "watt to watt" comparison 12900k vs 5950x

Poor w1zz, the time it takes to do these things is immense but ooooh brain candy


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 9, 2021)

Borc said:


> Unfortunately something is completely broken in this test, the 100W, 65W etc. scores are way too low. Much lower than any other scaling test.



Scaling with power does seem strange in some cases, for example Cinebench R23 Multi. Possibly it might have to do with the E-cores, or perhaps there's an issue similar to what I observed on my i9-11900 when setting PL1=PL2 at lower power levels.

This might be clearer by graphing the results like this:







EDIT: I made a short test with my 11900 and it scales similarly (it maxed out at 146W during the test), so it could just be that the _score scaling_ feels unusual compared to the _time_ scaling with fixed workloads (e.g. Blender, etc).


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## Mussels (Dec 9, 2021)

Zubasa said:


> You basically described the 5800 non-X for OEMs. That chip is one of the most efficient Desktop CPUs out there.
> 
> AMD pretty much did just that.


Yeah, that's my point. If you look at the early zen 3 leaks, we had a 5700x mentioned that never appeared - i think both companies are fighting to win irrelevant benchmarks at this point


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## bug (Dec 9, 2021)

I'd be curious to know whether there's a setting for tau as well in the UEFI.


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## Ed_1 (Dec 9, 2021)

bug said:


> I'd be curious to know whether there's a setting for tau as well in the UEFI.


In the bios there 3 settings you can change, short time max power (PL2), long time base power (PL1) and TAU. so you have two wattages and one time value.
Stock PL1=PL2 so Tau doesn't come into play.


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## Borc (Dec 9, 2021)

Solid State Brain said:


> Scaling with power does seem strange in some cases, for example Cinebench R23 Multi. Possibly it might have to do with the E-cores, or perhaps there's an issue similar to what I observed on my i9-11900 when setting PL1=PL2 at lower power levels.
> 
> This might be clearer by graphing the results like this:
> 
> ...




It needs to be checked what is wrong, I mean all other get 22500-23000 points in Cinebench R23 at 125W and he barely gets 19000 points. The 190W+241W scores seems to be fine.


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## LTUGamer (Dec 10, 2021)




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## bug (Dec 10, 2021)

LTUGamer said:


> View attachment 228301


Mind you, there's nothing wrong with self overclocking and making use of thermal headroom as long as the silicon can take it.


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## Mussels (Dec 10, 2021)

LTUGamer said:


> View attachment 228301


When theres no competition, they tune them for efficiency and give us OC'ing headroom

When the competition runs hot, both teams run the chips balls to the wall and leave efficiency behind


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## InVasMani (Dec 10, 2021)

600W balls to the wall the ways it's meant to be played by Uncle Huang leather jacket not included. That is a pretty good assessment they slap down the efficiency and cruise control when competition is far in the rear view mirror, but closer than it appears.


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## GURU7OF9 (Dec 10, 2021)

Great and very interesting review .
Well done wizzard !


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## AusWolf (Dec 10, 2021)

Mussels said:


> When theres no competition, they tune them for efficiency and give us OC'ing headroom
> 
> When the competition runs hot, both teams run the chips balls to the wall and leave efficiency behind


"Hey boss, this new chip we're working on is still 0.1% behind AMD."
"Hmm... let's see what happens if we run the power output of 5 atomic plants through it."


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 10, 2021)

Mussels said:


> When theres no competition, they tune them for efficiency and give us OC'ing headroom
> 
> When the competition runs hot, both teams run the chips balls to the wall and leave efficiency behind



This seems correct. On one hand, I find positive that users can now easily decide whether to use CPUs in factory-overclocked mode, or use them more like they were used to be produced in the past just by changing a few options (often just the power limits). On the other hand, I think a reasonably "efficient mode" should have been the default, perhaps through some sort of officially-defined simple PL preset system.


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## wolf (Dec 10, 2021)

InVasMani said:


> 600W balls to the wall the ways it's meant to be played by Uncle Huang leather jacket not included.


What are you on about?


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## londiste (Dec 10, 2021)

Solid State Brain said:


> Scaling with power does seem strange in some cases, for example Cinebench R23 Multi. Possibly it might have to do with the E-cores, or perhaps there's an issue similar to what I observed on my i9-11900 when setting PL1=PL2 at lower power levels.
> 
> This might be clearer by graphing the results like this:
> 
> ...


I bet if you put frequency on the same graph it turns out to be just because the frequencies it reaches require more and more power.
At 241W P-cores run at 4.9GHz, at 190W it is probably 4.7GHz


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 10, 2021)

londiste said:


> I bet if you put frequency on the same graph it turns out to be just because the frequencies it reaches require more and more power.
> At 241W P-cores run at 4.9GHz, at 190W it is probably 4.7GHz



Performance in multithread benchmarks like Cinebench should increase almost perfectly linearly with frequency, but the presence of slower E-cores on Alder Lake makes this relationship less clear.

I tried repeating a test at fixed all-core frequencies from 4.6 GHz down to the base clock of 2.5 GHz with my i9-11900. Plotting the results against CPU frequency makes them easier to understand. I just varied all-core boost frequency, not the PL, so perhaps this has an effect as well, but it is clear that power requirements increase more or less exponentially with frequency, so squeezing a few hundreds more MHz would have a very large effect on them. This should a general principle valid for all CPUs.






EDIT: by the way, the effect of temperature on power consumption can alter the results as pointed out earlier by Xebec, so this would have to be taken into account when doing CPU power testing. Hotter CPUs will throttle at lower frequencies for the same power limit when hot, or conversely consume more power if the frequency is fixed.


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## W1zzard (Dec 10, 2021)

bug said:


> I'd be curious to know whether there's a setting for tau as well in the UEFI.


Yes there is, but when running PL1=PL2 it doesn't matter


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## Fifagi (Dec 10, 2021)

In asus z690 how i can set pl1=125 pl2=125?

Thanks n


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## W1zzard (Dec 10, 2021)

Fifagi said:


> In asus z690 how i can set pl1=125 pl2=125?
> 
> Thanks n









set long duration and short duration power limit to 125 W


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## InVasMani (Dec 10, 2021)

wolf said:


> What are you on about?


https://www.igorslab.de/en/up-to-60...vidias-rtx-3090-ti-makes-the-start-exclusive/


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## bug (Dec 10, 2021)

W1zzard said:


> Yes there is, but when running PL1=PL2 it doesn't matter


Obviously, but as stated above, I'm planning to set PL2 to 190 and try a lower PL1


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## THANATOS (Dec 10, 2021)

Many thanks for the very interesting review.

What I find weird is that i9-12900K limited to 50W for both PL1 and PL2 provides only 8872 points in CB R23 and the power consumption is 120W.
If you check Intel Core i9-12900K E-Cores Only Performance Review then you will find out that  i9-12900K with only E-cores enabled provides 10366 points in CB R23 and consumes 118W.
You gain almost 17% higher score and power consumption is actually 2W lower.

The other interesting thing is the actual clockspeed of this i9-12900K limited to 50W.
If i9-12900K's P-cores work at 4.9GHz and E-cores work at 3.7GHz with PL1=PL2=241W and generate 27780 points in CB R23 then PL1=PL2=50W and score of 8872(or ~32% of Full performance at 241W) would mean P-cores are working at measly ~1568Mhz and E-cores at 1184MHz.


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## AusWolf (Dec 11, 2021)

Solid State Brain said:


> Performance in multithread benchmarks like Cinebench should increase almost perfectly linearly with frequency, but the presence of slower E-cores on Alder Lake makes this relationship less clear.
> 
> I tried repeating a test at fixed all-core frequencies from 4.6 GHz down to the base clock of 2.5 GHz with my i9-11900. Plotting the results against CPU frequency makes them easier to understand. I just varied all-core boost frequency, not the PL, so perhaps this has an effect as well, but it is clear that power requirements increase more or less exponentially with frequency, so squeezing a few hundreds more MHz would have a very large effect on them. This should a general principle valid for all CPUs.
> 
> ...


Interesting findings. I did a similar run with my 11700, which is (theoretically) identical to your 11900 except for its different boost table and lack of TVB.

At 65 W, your 11900 scored way above 10000 points - my 11700 scored 9267.
At 125 W, yours scored around 14000 - mine scored 11700 (funny enough).
Your diagram ends a bit above 140 W and 14500 points (I guess?) - with unlocked power limits, my CPU eats around 165 W in CB R23 and scores 14100.

With this regard, it would be interesting to see how differently a 12900K and 12900 non-K limited to the same power limit perform.


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## InVasMani (Dec 11, 2021)

THANATOS said:


> Many thanks for the very interesting review.
> 
> What I find weird is that i9-12900K limited to 50W for both PL1 and PL2 provides only 8872 points in CB R23 and the power consumption is 120W.
> If you check Intel Core i9-12900K E-Cores Only Performance Review then you will find out that  i9-12900K with only E-cores enabled provides 10366 points in CB R23 and consumes 118W.
> ...


I think it's a case of the E cores being more efficient than P cores unless you drop the multiplier on the P cores to more closely match the E cores in general outside of certain workloads and instruction sets provided you don't push the E cores too high on frequency then you start to lose the efficiency advantage though overall performance will still rise. Drop the P cores frequency down to same level of E cores and they'll be more efficient. The P cores being pushed as far as they are is what makes then inefficient the same would be just as true or more with E cores being too aggressively pushed. That performance would rise with E cores being pushed higher than the P cores at the same frequencies relative to the die space of each they come out ahead. 

That is why Intel has adopted this design and is expanding around increasing the number of E cores more aggressively. You can get more performance and efficiency mileage out of them over a P core though they are less specialized than a P core at certain tasks and at the same clock frequency. The P core's aren't being eliminated, but over emphasis around them is diminishing due to performance and efficiency advantages of how the E cores can be used since they pack in more performance in the same die space area.


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 11, 2021)

AusWolf said:


> Interesting findings. I did a similar run with my 11700, which is (theoretically) identical to your 11900 except for its different boost table and lack of TVB.
> 
> At 65 W, your 11900 scored way above 10000 points - my 11700 scored 9267.
> At 125 W, yours scored around 14000 - mine scored 11700 (funny enough).
> ...



Actual data was as follows in my case:






I have a good CPU and voltages have been optimized a bit (lower V at lower frequencies and higher V at higher ones—it wasn't fully stable there at default settings). I think the results strongly depend on the actual CPU tested and motherboard settings; a 12900 non-K might not necessarily be worse than 12900K, although it's likely to be.

Before the i9-11900 I had an i7-11700K, which is almost identical in terms of boost frequencies, but it didn't seem to cooperate well with my motherboard and required significantly higher voltages to be fully stable (thus it was hotter and consumed more power). I had to pay for the difference, but I think it was worth it; I might have been lucky.


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## AusWolf (Dec 11, 2021)

Solid State Brain said:


> Actual data was as follows in my case:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Now I see, score = frequency for both of our CPUs - I mean, my CPU scores the same at the same frequencies. The only difference is power consumption. Your 11900 seems to be eating around 20 W less than my 11700 at lower frequencies and around 30-35 W less at higher frequencies, although I admit, I've never touched the voltages. I have a feeling that my motherboard likes supplying a bit more voltage than necessary, bumping my power consumption a bit above yours, despite the slightly lower boost table. Honestly, as long as my cooling handles it, I'm fine. 

I suspect there's even more variation in voltage by motherboard choice with newer CPUs, making objective testing increasingly difficult.


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 11, 2021)

It might not necessarily be eating more power in your case. 

One important point for accurate Package Power readings is that the DC Load Line setting of the CPU must be set the to the same value as the VRM Load Line (i.e. what is commonly known as LLC), otherwise it might show higher or lower power. PL1 and PL2 will also work incorrectly and limit the CPU to the wrong level if it's not. 

 




In my case, I have a "Medium" LLC which has a value of 0.7 mOhm, so I set the DC Load Line value accordingly. The AC Load Line value affects actual voltages along the entire voltage-frequency curve (when using Auto voltages), but not the power reporting.

Some motherboard manufacturers set the AC and the DC loadline setting to the same value (and the AC value tends to be low to limit voltages), but this may lead to incorrect CPU power reporting.


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## chrcoluk (Dec 11, 2021)

Selaya said:


> no, that's definitely not true. Intel's efficiency curve doesn't plummet until like 150-180W.



It goes from 125w to 245w on the tests, hence my comment.

A CPU already running at 180w is not efficient in the first place in my opinion.  but we all have different opinions, however to clarify, my comment is based upon TPU data.


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## THANATOS (Dec 11, 2021)

InVasMani said:


> I think it's a case of the E cores being more efficient than P cores unless you drop the multiplier on the P cores to more closely match the E cores in general outside of certain workloads and instruction sets provided you don't push the E cores too high on frequency then you start to lose the efficiency advantage though overall performance will still rise. Drop the P cores frequency down to same level of E cores and they'll be more efficient. The P cores being pushed as far as they are is what makes then inefficient the same would be just as true or more with E cores being too aggressively pushed. That performance would rise with E cores being pushed higher than the P cores at the same frequencies relative to the die space of each they come out ahead.
> 
> That is why Intel has adopted this design and is expanding around increasing the number of E cores more aggressively. You can get more performance and efficiency mileage out of them over a P core though they are less specialized than a P core at certain tasks and at the same clock frequency. The P core's aren't being eliminated, but over emphasis around them is diminishing due to performance and efficiency advantages of how the E cores can be used since they pack in more performance in the same die space area.


It's not about which core is more efficient at what clock. Look at this:

1.) 8* E-cores at 3.9GHz (TPU review)
Power consumption(whole system): 118 W
Performance in CB R23: 10366

2.) 8C+8c i9 12900K limited to 50W for PL1=PL2
Power consumption(whole system): 120 W
Performance in CB R23:  8872
based on this CB score the clocks should be:
8xP-cores: 1568Mhz
8xE-cores: 1184MHz

In the first case these E-cores should be clocked past their optimal point, yet It's more efficient than the second case where the clocks are extremely low. This shouldn't be happening If you think about It.

Here is a 12700K scoring 12452 in CB23 where PL1=PL2 were limited to 50W.
Anandtech forum

Then we also have scores for the mobile CPUs of the previous generation. Techspot review




i9 12900K limited to 50W scores a lot less than 11980HK at 45W. Why?
This doesn't make any sense when ADL is a new and better architecture made on a better process.
One possible explanation I can think of is that CPU voltage stayed at much higher values than needed, and with limiting power to 50W It caused low clocks.


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## Solid State Brain (Dec 11, 2021)

I'll humbly suggest again to verify if clocks and voltages are correct on the 12900K using PL1=PL2="low value", because on my 11900 I have performance issues when I try to limit power in this way, as I mentioned earlier.

Setting PL2>PL1 with Tau to a very short duration (e.g. 0.5 seconds; shorter values may not work correctly) with ThrottleStop so that the processor will go right away to PL1 should be able to highlight if significant differences arise. Alternatively, PL1 could be set to a very low value, while PL2 could be set to the desired power level and Tau to infinite/very long time.


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## AusWolf (Dec 11, 2021)

THANATOS said:


> It's not about which core is more efficient at what clock. Look at this:
> 
> 1.) 8* E-cores at 3.9GHz (TPU review)
> Power consumption(whole system): 118 W
> ...


Maybe work distribution and the communication between E and P cores isn't flawless when power limits are set too low.

I also don't think that E and P cores (should) change clocks in a parallel manner when PL values are modified. Pushing more work onto E cores at low PL and P cores at high PL would make more sense, imo.


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## Melvis (Dec 14, 2021)

Yikes just shows how pushed this CPU is to try and match the 5950X, set at the same power limit as the 5950X and it gets destroyed.


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## Thanamite (Feb 1, 2022)

AusWolf said:


> With this regard, it would be interesting to see how differently a 12900K and 12900 non-K limited to the same power limit perform.


I am very interested in this for a server I am planning to build as an NVR etc. Multithreaded performance will be important but not at any power cost since the server will be up 24/7. Single threaded performance will be less important.

It looks like a PL1/PL2 setting of 75/150 would work well for me but will the same 75/150 setting give me better multithreaded performance if I wait for the non-k 12900?



THANATOS said:


> Many thanks for the very interesting review.
> 
> What I find weird is that i9-12900K limited to 50W for both PL1 and PL2 provides only 8872 points in CB R23 and the power consumption is 120W.
> If you check Intel Core i9-12900K E-Cores Only Performance Review then you will find out that  i9-12900K with only E-cores enabled provides 10366 points in CB R23 and consumes 118W.
> ...


These tell me that getting a 12900K and limiting its power consumption is not the same as getting a cpu optimized for the lower power consumption. This is why I am waiting for the 12900 (non-k).


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## Solid State Brain (Mar 25, 2022)

In the end I got an i7-12700K. I overclocked to some extent, but I wonder how useful that is in compute multicore loads. It takes a lot of power for minimal improvements after a certain threshold. Below is a graph of render times vs processor package power that I made with Blender (note that recent versions of Blender on Linux are faster than the one tested by TPU on Windows).




The sweet spot seems to be around 105W.


Data: 


*Power (W)*​*Render Time*​15​06:13.00​25​03:29.34​35​02:48.59​45​02:25.32​65​01:59.07​77​01:52.41​95​01:45.16​105​01:41.65​115​01:39.49​125​01:38.05​145​01:35.23​160​01:33.60​170​01:32.51​


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## InVasMani (Mar 25, 2022)

THANATOS said:


> It's not about which core is more efficient at what clock. Look at this:
> 
> 1.) 8* E-cores at 3.9GHz (TPU review)
> Power consumption(whole system): 118 W
> ...


The cache design structure of the E cores relative to die space beats the piss out of the P cores however which can't be overlooked. The L3 cache alone is double on E cores in relative terms, but it wins across the entire spectrum from a die area standpoint for every metric of L1/L2/L3 cache. If you can't figure out why that would be a positive thing you probably think 3D stacked cache is dumb as well.


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## Xebec (Mar 25, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> In the end I got an i7-12700K. I overclocked to some extent, but I wonder how useful that is in compute multicore loads. It takes a lot of power for minimal improvements after a certain threshold. Below is a graph of render times vs processor package power that I made with Blender (note that recent versions of Blender on Linux are faster than the one tested by TPU on Windows).
> 
> View attachment 241219
> The sweet spot seems to be around 105W.
> ...


Very nice data and info - thank you!

Did you happen to capture the temperature at each power level?    As the temperature gets hotter, the chip tends to consume more power even at the same frequency..  I'd be curious if that was part of the curve here too.


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## Solid State Brain (Mar 25, 2022)

@Xebec :  I didn't, but at 21 °C ambient temperature and open case (Fractal Design Define C) with Noctua NH-D15S (one fan) and moderate fan speed at the 170W power level I got 87 °C peak at 4800 MHz P-cores / 3600 MHz E-cores.

I do expect that higher temperatures will imply a higher power consumption but a detailed test to determine its exact influence would need a more powerful and controllable cooling.


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## InVasMani (Mar 25, 2022)

The sweet spot balance between performance and efficiency in those charts to me appears closer to 65w. Beyond the 65w efficiency relative to performance gains really falls off quickly and steeply while the gains in performance up to that point are quite large. You save more time to render from 15w up to 65w than the entire rest of the chart from 65w up to 170w. The first 15w to 25w is enormous on efficiency. The 65w mark from a analogy standpoint is kind of your midway base camp up the mountain it's the comfortably numb spot.


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## Solid State Brain (Mar 25, 2022)

At 65W, even though technically the processor works more efficiently, there's still a decent amount of performance left. I probably wouldn't cap power this low unless the PC was part of a rendering cluster operating many hours a day or even continuously. I find 105W the threshold above which it seems almost silly to put more power into the CPU for faster render speeds in this application, which is what I mostly meant.

At 65W, by the way, my CPU operates in this Blender test at about 3800 MHz (P-cores) / 3100 MHz (E-cores), hottest core at 60 °C, but I set my Noctua NH-D15S cooler to run semi-passively (mainly to avoid dust buildup) and under 62 °C its fan is not spinning.


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## InVasMani (Mar 26, 2022)

Need for speed hot pursuit Intel Alder Lake Edition.


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## fevgatos (Jun 18, 2022)

THANATOS said:


> It's not about which core is more efficient at what clock. Look at this:
> 
> 1.) 8* E-cores at 3.9GHz (TPU review)
> Power consumption(whole system): 118 W
> ...


Yeah, the tests are wrong. 12900k at 75w score 18500-19200, and at 125w it score over 23500. We tested 3 different CPUS at 4 different motherboards. There is something very weird going on with this review



Melvis said:


> Yikes just shows how pushed this CPU is to try and match the 5950X, set at the same power limit as the 5950X and it gets destroyed.


No it doesn't, it's just that the numbers on the review are plain wrong.

@TheoneandonlyMrK Are you laughing cause you know im right? It's not just me saying this, there are other users on other forums, like this from anandtech






						Page 59 - Question - Alder Lake - Official Thread
					

Page 59 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.




					forums.anandtech.com


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## Solid State Brain (Jun 18, 2022)

For what it's worth, on my i7-12700K I observed that depending on BIOS settings the CPU can favor Ring or E-core frequency rather than P-core frequency when altering the power limit, and therefore efficiency might not necessarily scale with power as expected.


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## Melvis (Jun 19, 2022)

fevgatos said:


> No it doesn't, it's just that the numbers on the review are plain wrong.



Says who? and im no going by your word (looks at your system specs) as that just be plain biased......

We already know the 59050X vs 12900K at stock clocks is a miss match in who wins what, till you put on PBO and the 5950X runs away in heavy 100% CPU benchmarks over the 12900K and using alot less power thats just fact. So please enlighten us?


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## fevgatos (Jun 19, 2022)

Melvis said:


> Says who? and im no going by your word (looks at your system specs) as that just be plain biased......
> 
> We already know the 59050X vs 12900K at stock clocks is a miss match in who wins what, till you put on PBO and the 5950X runs away in heavy 100% CPU benchmarks over the 12900K and using alot less power thats just fact. So please enlighten us?


It's just plain biased to put a 125w power limit in my 12900k and test it? LOL.

I'm telling you, the 12900 at DEFAULT settings with a 125w power limit does around 23500 to 24200 points in CBR23, and around 18500-19000 at 75 watts. I don't know exactly what the reviewer did, but it's obvious wrong.

Do you want me to open my 3700x computer and post with that one? Will that make me less biased?


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## Mussels (Jun 21, 2022)

fevgatos said:


> It's just plain biased to put a 125w power limit in my 12900k and test it? LOL.
> 
> I'm telling you, the 12900 at DEFAULT settings with a 125w power limit does around 23500 to 24200 points in CBR23, and around 18500-19000 at 75 watts. I don't know exactly what the reviewer did, but it's obvious wrong.
> 
> Do you want me to open my 3700x computer and post with that one? Will that make me less biased?


For all we know, you've got a flawed test setup. As the one making the claims you have to actually prove that - TPU reviewers do so by publishing dozens of reviews and a lot of repeat testing, so flaws get noticed (changing CPU and motherboard for reviews is an easy example)

Have you confirmed your theory works with other motherboards? Other bios revisions?
It wouldnt be the first time power limits have been ignored or falsely reported by motherboard vendors to win benchmarks, on AMD or intel


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## fevgatos (Jun 21, 2022)

Mussels said:


> For all we know, you've got a flawed test setup. As the one making the claims you have to actually prove that - TPU reviewers do so by publishing dozens of reviews and a lot of repeat testing, so flaws get noticed (changing CPU and motherboard for reviews is an easy example)
> 
> Have you confirmed your theory works with other motherboards? Other bios revisions?
> It wouldnt be the first time power limits have been ignored or falsely reported by motherboard vendors to win benchmarks, on AMD or intel


Yeap, tested 3 different 12900k on 4 different mobos (3 apexes and a unify x). Power limit hasn't been ignored, hwinfo reported 75.06w peak consumption for the 75w power limit test.

Besides testing, it's just common sense. The 12600k cannot tie the 12900k at the same power limit in a MT test...


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## Mussels (Jun 21, 2022)

fevgatos said:


> Yeap, tested 3 different 12900k on 4 different mobos (3 apexes and a unify x). Power limit hasn't been ignored, hwinfo reported 75.06w peak consumption for the 75w power limit test.
> 
> Besides testing, it's just common sense. The 12600k cannot tie the 12900k at the same power limit in a MT test...


Common sense has nothing to do with how computers behave. My TV can make my GPU stutter and my ex-housemates PC would bluescreen if you opened his bar-fridge while his xbox controller was connected (power surge issue)

It's absolutely possible for wattage to get thrown to the wrong CPU cores and screw with results, especially since this review was when the platform was new

What matters here is repeatable data, making sure all tests are done the same, and if there is anomaly narrowing it down.
You wont get anywhere being hostile - you WILL get somewhere if you list exactly what you tested, the results you got, how to reproduce it and ask why the reviews was different.
(To be fair, I often come off as angry as a ferret in someones undies when i'm trying to solve problems, myself)


Is this something one of the BIOS updates could have fixed, or even the updates to windows 11's scheduler for these new CPU's?


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## fevgatos (Jun 21, 2022)

Mussels said:


> Common sense has nothing to do with how computers behave. My TV can make my GPU stutter and my ex-housemates PC would bluescreen if you opened his bar-fridge while his xbox controller was connected (power surge issue)
> 
> It's absolutely possible for wattage to get thrown to the wrong CPU cores and screw with results, especially since this review was when the platform was new
> 
> ...


The bios on one of the mobos I tested is the default the mobo ships with. So i dont know where thr problem lies exactly, but there is definitely something wrong with the results.

Im not angry, angry are the people accusing of bias cause i have the cpu. As if i could know there was a problem if i didn't have the cpu...

Angry is also the person spamming laugh emoticons on my posts cause they don't want to admit im right


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jun 21, 2022)

fevgatos said:


> The bios on one of the mobos I tested is the default the mobo ships with. So i dont know where thr problem lies exactly, but there is definitely something wrong with the results.
> 
> Im not angry, angry are the people accusing of bias cause i have the cpu. As if i could know there was a problem if i didn't have the cpu...
> 
> Angry is also the person spamming laugh emoticons on my posts cause they don't want to admit im right


Happy is the man not baited by the fool.

Your proof is still missing, so I'll likely stay out the convo, as I was , bait me back in and I'll be pm ING you my exact opinion.


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## fevgatos (Jun 21, 2022)

What proof do you want? I can post some screenshots but how would you know im running default settings? Honestly, what proof does the review have? Its just some bars made on paint...


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## InVasMani (Jun 21, 2022)

TPU gets sent test review samples by big corporations to put some bars made on paint...just how many have you been sent personally and how do you choose to display benchmark results for comparison analysis that is so much better in terms of being clear and concise to look at for easy interpretation!!?


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## fevgatos (Jun 21, 2022)

InVasMani said:


> TPU gets sent test review samples by big corporations to put some bars made on paint...just how many have you been sent personally and how do you choose to display benchmark results for comparison analysis that is so much better in terms of being clear and concise to look at for easy interpretation!!?


I think you missed the point, and you are intentionally strawmaning. 

Never said they make stuff up, what im saying is, bars are not proof. I don't require proof from TPU cause i trust them, so i dont need proof. But me trusting them doesnt mean their reviews contain proof, cause they don't. Its just a bunch of graph bars. Thats just a fact


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jun 21, 2022)

fevgatos said:


> I think you missed the point, and you are intentionally strawmaning.
> 
> Never said they make stuff up, what im saying is, bars are not proof. I don't require proof from TPU cause i trust them, so i dont need proof. But me trusting them doesnt mean their reviews contain proof, cause they don't. Its just a bunch of graph bars. Thats just a fact


Those bar graphs are compiled from real test data, and as a test engineer, This is the Way.

If you're dumb ass doesn't see that FACT who the f£#@ could possibly help you.


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## InVasMani (Jun 21, 2022)

You said the tests are wrong and numbers are wrong. If you trusted their information is correct you wouldn't be on this forum arguing to the contrary that it's wrong. Show some sort of evidence around why it's incorrect. What more proof do you want than the test results they gathered!!?


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## fevgatos (Jun 21, 2022)

InVasMani said:


> You said the tests are wrong and numbers are wrong. If you trusted their information is correct you wouldn't be on this forum arguing to the contrary that it's wrong. Show some sort of evidence around why it's incorrect. What more proof do you want than the test results they gathered!!?


The tests are wrong. Im not saying he made them up, im saying either he or the motherboard he used applies something that shouldn't. I can link you a screenshot from my 12900 running cbr23, but how would you know im running stock settings?



TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Those bar graphs are compiled from real test data, and as a test engineer, This is the Way.
> 
> If you're dumb ass doesn't see that FACT who the f£#@ could possibly help you.


And yet you dont have any proof that the graphs are compiled from real data. You just trust the reviewer. If you cant understand what proof actually is then please, make your "threat" a reality and ignore me. Dont want to talk to a person that doesnt know what proof is. Especially one that calls himself a test engineer


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jun 21, 2022)

fevgatos said:


> The tests are wrong. *Im not saying he made them up*, im saying either he or the motherboard he used applies something that shouldn't. I can link you a screenshot from my 12900 running cbr23, but how would you know im running stock settings?
> 
> *
> And yet you dont have any proof that the graphs are compiled from real data.* You just trust the reviewer. If you cant understand what proof actually is then please, make your "threat" a reality and ignore me. Dont want to talk to a person that doesnt know what proof is. Especially one that calls himself a test engineer


See bold. Confused. Com.

Argue with yourself from now on , you might make sense to you.


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## fevgatos (Jun 21, 2022)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> See bold. Confused. Com.
> 
> Argue with yourself from now on , you might make sense to you.


You are confused indeed. Just because I don't think he made them up doesn't mean he provided any evidence for them....do you not understand the difference?


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## InVasMani (Jun 21, 2022)

You need to do more than simply profess that TPU is wrong. You aren't winning anyone over on that argument simply stating that to be the case. Show example cases of where it doesn't align with what TPU was testing for in the first place by other credible reviewers and maybe then there can be further discussion over the matter on why the results differ and there can be more determination on which is right or wrong for which reason.


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## fevgatos (Jun 21, 2022)

InVasMani said:


> You need to do more than simply profess that TPU is wrong. You aren't winning anyone over on that argument simply stating that to be the case. Show example cases of where it doesn't align with what TPU was testing for in the first place by other credible reviewers and maybe then there can be further discussion over the matter on why the results differ and there can be more determination on which is right or wrong for which reason.


I did that already. Igorslab has blender results from a 12900k @ 125watts, it handily beats the 12600k by a large margin, yet TPU has the 2 very close.

Anyways, I don't need to win anyone over, I'm just telling you what is. If you don't want to accept reality, from an actual owner of the actual CPU we are talking about , then so be it, you don't have to believe me. You can believe that the 12900k loses in MT to a 12600k at same wattage...I don't mind 

Here are some CBR23 runs, at stock 75w and tuned 75w


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## HenrySomeone (Jun 22, 2022)

It has been shown several times already, including on this site, that when properly configured, 12900k is a monster performer at lower power limits, this for example is at 35W:


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## fevgatos (Jun 22, 2022)

HenrySomeone said:


> It has been shown several times already, including on this site, that when properly configured, 12900k is a monster performer at lower power limits, this for example is at 35W:
> View attachment 251955


I can get over 15k at 34 watts actualy. And I'm talking about package power, not ia cores power.


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## HenrySomeone (Jun 22, 2022)

fevgatos said:


> I can get over 15k at 34 watts actualy. And I'm talking about package power, not ia cores power.


Seems entirely possible, since the picture I posted is back from November, therefore with extra time for bios updates or just more in-depth tuning, I can totally believe what you're saying (but I'm pretty sure a number of team red associates will take offense to that, hehe   )


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## fevgatos (Jun 22, 2022)

HenrySomeone said:


> Seems entirely possible, since the picture I posted is back from November, therefore with extra time for bios updates or just more in-depth tuning, I can totally believe what you're saying (but I'm pretty sure a number of team red associates will take offense to that, hehe   )


Still, here is a screenshot for the non believers  I can do better, but then system starts losing stability at idle or light loads. The minimum Vcore drops to less than 0.6. To actually get better STABLE results ill need to start tuning the VF curve for lower loads, but honestly I don't see the point, it's already the most efficient CPU on planet Earth


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## Solid State Brain (Jun 22, 2022)

What are your load VID and Vcore? They have to roughly match for power measurements to be correct and power limits to work as intended. In the above screenshot only core VIDs are visible.


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## fevgatos (Jun 22, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> What are your load VID and Vcore? They have to roughly match for power measurements to be correct and power limits to work as intended. In the above screenshot only core VIDs are visible.


What? Vid is the number requested by  the processor, Vcore is the actual voltage supplied


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## Solid State Brain (Jun 22, 2022)

Just FYI, on Intel CPUs it is possible to set the "DC Loadline" parameter to very low or very high values and massively change up or down reported package power and VID, without any difference in actual power consumption or voltages.

When DC Loadline has been correctly set, VID matches Vcore under load.




			VCCCORE DC Specifications - 001 - ID:655258 | 12th Generation Intel® Core™ Processors Datasheet, Volume 1 of 2
		




> 14. Load Line (DC) should be measured by the VRTT tool and programmed accordingly via the BIOS Load Line override setup options.* DC Load Line BIOS programming directly affects power measurements (DC)*.


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## fevgatos (Jun 22, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> Just FYI, on Intel CPUs it is possible to set the "DC Loadline" parameter to very low or very high values and massively change up or down reported package power and VID, without any difference in actual power consumption or voltages.
> 
> When DC Loadline has been correctly set, VID matches Vcore under load.
> 
> ...


Which would explain the problem with the review...? Interesting, i played with dc ac loadlines back when i had the apex but it seemed to make a difference on custom settings. When you are running default vid already matched vcore


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## Solid State Brain (Jun 22, 2022)

An incorrect DC loadline setting could one reason, but other settings can affect CPU behavior as well.

For example, MSI likes to use fairly high *A*C loadline (which affects actual load voltages with Adaptive voltages), with the result that default voltages and therefore power consumption tend to be on the high side on motherboards from this manufacturer.

Furthermore, not all CPUs are equal and some may use lower voltages from the factory than others, even if they are supposed to have the same base specifications.

As I mentioned earlier, BIOS bugs or quirks may also occasionally lead to strange frequency behavior, in particular when setting the power limit to a level lower than base power (125W for the 12900K).

All of these factors and possibly more may lead to inconsistent results. In principle it would be just a matter of setting the power limit and comparing results with other CPUs, but in practice it is more complicated than this and one has to be careful checking out motherboards settings and understanding what they do, as well as monitoring CPU behavior throroughly. I don't expect busy hardware reviewers to do this properly. For instance, have you ever seen any of them mentioning AC/DC loadline values in these tests? There's no true "Intel default" for these, just a maximum specification and motherboards will generally use some value below that.


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## fevgatos (Jun 22, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> An incorrect DC loadline setting could one reason, but other settings can affect CPU behavior as well.
> 
> For example, MSI likes to use fairly high *A*C loadline (which affects actual load voltages with Adaptive voltages), with the result that default voltages and therefore power consumption tend to be on the high side on motherboards from this manufacturer.
> 
> ...


Well I don't think the discrepancy is due to cpu variance, we are talking about a 70% difference which is nuts. Btw, since you have a 12700k, you can test it yourself. You will get way higher numbers at those wattages even when you are missing 4 ecores.


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## Solid State Brain (Jun 22, 2022)

I don't normally use Windows but I have it on a different SSD. So I had to reboot into it.
My CPU is moderately undervolted below its built-in (i.e. "fused") voltage-frequency curve.

Note how in my case under load VID = Vcore and thus power measurements should be about correct, since I correctly configured the DC Loadline parameter in BIOS.

12700K 75W (16568 pts):





12700K 125W (21501 pts):


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## fevgatos (Jun 22, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> I don't normally use Windows but I have it on a different SSD. So I had to reboot into it.
> My CPU is moderately undervolted below its built-in (i.e. "fused") voltage-frequency curve.
> 
> Note how in my case under load VID = Vcore and thus power measurements should be about correct, since I correctly configured the DC Loadline parameter in BIOS.
> ...


So, you are proving my point. There is something gone horribly wrong with the review....


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## Solid State Brain (Jun 22, 2022)

I still maintain that a combination of CPU quality and BIOS settings (or early BIOS) may have caused poor results with lower power limits. Though, I just tried to intentionally realistically mess up default BIOS settings in my case and the worst I could get with my 12700K with CB R23 at 125W was about 18500 points.

A previous 11th gen Intel motherboard I owned also had performance issues when setting PL1 to the same value as PL2 (probably due to bugs), so something along these lines could have possibly occurred as well in this review when limiting power. I think I already mentioned this much earlier on in this thread.


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## fevgatos (Jun 23, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> I still maintain that a combination of CPU quality and BIOS settings (or early BIOS) may have caused poor results with lower power limits. Though, I just tried to intentionally realistically mess up default BIOS settings in my case and the worst I could get with my 12700K with CB R23 at 125W was about 18500 points.
> 
> A previous 11th gen Intel motherboard I owned also had performance issues when setting PL1 to the same value as PL2 (probably due to bugs), so something along these lines could have possibly occurred as well in this review when limiting power. I think I already mentioned this much earlier on in this thread.


Yeah, I know in 11th gen (had a 11600k for a while) setting PL1 = PL2 caused all kinds of weird stuff.

Anyways, thanks for willing to test - and validate my results. The doubting crowd has gone silent though, good good


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## Solid State Brain (Jun 29, 2022)

For what it's worth, the issue might have been as simple as mistakenly setting the CPU to *fixed voltage*, preventing it from getting automatically downvolted when power-throttled. I tried configuring my i7-12700K CPU to fixed 1.35V and repeating the CB R23 125W test and I could only get barely above 10000 points, so that's clearly an easy way for affecting CPU power to a large extent.

If voltage was fixed, power consumption would decrease roughly linearly with clock speed, and scores would decrease accordingly (linearly) on benchmarks that are directly influenced by it. This seems very close to be the case for Cinebench R23 Multithread scores.


*Factor (Relative Power)*​*Power (W)*​*CB23 Multi Score (Calculated)*​*CB23 Multi Score (TPU)*​1.00​125​18138​18138​0.80​100​14510​14819​0.60​75​10883​11325​0.40​50​7255​8872​

At lower power levels calculated results appear to diverge slightly, but otherwise they seem overall similar to those calculated by decreasing 125W scores by a fixed factor proportional to the relative power.


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## kraiggers (Nov 8, 2022)

Selaya said:


> Very enlightening.
> Honestly, the 12900K'd have been a _much better_ product at 190W - losing 2% of performance for significantly more accessible cooling/VRM requirement's a great deal tbh.


Isn't PL1=125, PL2=190 equivalent to a i7 12700k?  (Or maybe its 190, 190?)

More specifically, I recently got a HP z2 mini g9 maxed with the i9 12900k.  I wish I had seen the information about thermals and performance beforehand — I foolishly selected the i9 when the i7 would have been a *much* better choice for the enclosure. 

To that end, what's the best way to 'dial down' the i9 to give a thermal envelope more (or exactly) like the i7 in the mini g9?  My understanding is the mini g9 is limited to a 125W base?  I presume that would be PL1=125, PL2=??   190? Less?  Both to 125?  Easier to just turn off Turbo? 

Thanks for any thoughts...


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 8, 2022)

Set PL1 to either 125W or the maximum power your system can sustain.

You can leave PL2 at 241W and set a lower temperature limit (e.g. 85 °C) if your motherboard allows it, otherwise you could set it to 190W like the 12700K. Alternatively, set a lower Tau (28s or even something in the order of 12-14s or less) so that power can still peak to the default limit for brief burst loads, but then decreased to the base before temperatures become an issue.

On my 12700K (overclocked to 5.2/3.9 GHz) I currently have PL1=125W, PL2=190W, IccMax=240A (so far like the default configuration), but also Tau=128s, TjMax=85°C. It is set so that the CPU thermally-throttles early, with 85 °C as a target point, while still allowing the base 125W PL1 to engage for prolonged rendering workloads (typically after 3-4 minutes; this never happens with games and regular usage).


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## kraiggers (Nov 8, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> Set PL1 to either 125W or the maximum power your system can sustain.
> 
> You can leave PL2 at 241W and set a lower temperature limit (e.g. 85 °C) if your motherboard allows it, otherwise you could set it to 190W like the 12700K. Alternatively, set a lower Tau (28s or even something in the order of 12-14s or less) so that power can still peak to the default limit for brief burst loads, but then decreased to the base before temperatures become an issue.
> 
> On my 12700K (overclocked to 5.2/3.9 GHz) I currently have PL1=125W, PL2=190W, IccMax=240A (so far like the default configuration), but also Tau=128s, TjMax=85°C.



Hey thanks.  It is an OEM HP, so I don't think I have the granularity of control I would like.  I hope I can use Intel Extreme Tuning Utility to adjust turbo boost power settings?

For all I know, the PL1 in this OEM machine might be LESS than 125w.  Maybe 65w?  

I guess I would set the short power max to 190w (like the i7) and the (long) power max to ??  I haven't found any specific information for this system as it has only been available at retail for a few months… And I don't think it really appeals to people who care about this level of operational detail.  I mean, I got suckered into the i9 when it is clearly a bad choice for this box.  Dumb.


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 8, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> Hey thanks.  It is an OEM HP, so I don't think I have the granularity of control I would like.  I hope I can use Intel Extreme Tuning Utility to adjust turbo boost power settings?



Probably. TPU Throttlestop might also work for configuring the power limits.



kraiggers said:


> For all I know, the PL1 in this OEM machine might be LESS than 125w.  Maybe 65w?



If you leave everything at default, on Windows you can check out in detail what are your settings with HWInfo. Here is a screenshot from the Internet:







kraiggers said:


> I guess I would set the short power max to 190w (like the i7) and the (long) power max to ??  I haven't found any specific information for this system as it has only been available at retail for a few months… And I don't think it really appeals to people who care about this level of operational detail.  I mean, I got suckered into the i9 when it is clearly a bad choice for this box.  Dumb.



If your system was designed to thermally support the i7-12700K, it should be fine to leave PL1 (long duration limit) at 125W.


*EDIT:*



kraiggers said:


> For all I know, the PL1 in this OEM machine might be LESS than 125w. Maybe 65w?



It looks like the TDP (PL1) is configured to 90W. PL2 might have been already configured accordingly to your system's cooling capabilities.


			https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c08109685


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## kraiggers (Nov 8, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> It looks like the TDP (PL1) is configured to 90W. PL2 might have been already configured accordingly to your system's cooling capabilities.
> 
> 
> https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c08109685



Thats fascinating.  But I'm not sure I understand what that footnote means...  PL1=90 PL2=125?  And whatever it does mean, it seems the same for the i5,  i7, and the i9? 

But the reviews of this mini g9 all seem to indicate the i9 gets HOT and LOUD (and also throttles) in ways the i7 doesn't.  Or at least doesn't as much.  Which makes me think there must be some kind of difference in PL2  between the default i7 and i9 settings *in this actual machine*?  But if so I can't find the detail info...

I guess one thing I've learned reading up on these processors is that disabling Turbo Boost entirely is an awfully blunt instrument in terms of just trying to control the thermals.  

A more nuanced solution that *should* offer the best combination of thermal control (and therefore quiet running) with still optimal performance is to find the best combination of PL1, PL2, and Tau for this particular enclosure… Which HP has clearly *not* done considering the noise levels mentioned in every review with the i9 at stock settings.


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 8, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> Thats fascinating. But I'm not sure I understand what that footnote means... PL1=90 PL2=125? And whatever it does mean, it seems the same for the i5, i7, and the i9?



It likely means it supports 12th gen Intel processors with a nominal TDP of 125W, but they will be used with a scaled down TDP (PL1) of 90W, and this will be the same for the i5, i7, i9.

PL2 (peak power, short-term power) is not specified here. You can check it out with HWInfo as instructed above. It might be set to a relatively high value so that the CPU will stay at TjMax (normally 100 °C) for a period while power slowly decreases until PL1 is engaged.

"Throttling" is not necessarily a bad word. All modern processors throttle as part of their normal operation for a reason or another (power limits, current limits, thermal limits, etc). You can can set lower power (PL2) or temperature limits so that the CPU will throttle earlier (i.e. _more_) and will not heat up as much, causing less noise.


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## kraiggers (Nov 8, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> It likely means it supports 12th gen Intel processors with a nominal TDP of 125W, but they will be used with a scaled down TDP (PL1) of 90W, and this will be the same for the i5, i7, i9.
> 
> PL2 (peak power, short-term power) is not specified here. You can check it out with HWInfo as instructed above. It might be set to a relatively high value so that the CPU will stay at TjMax (normally 100 °C) for a relatively short period while power slowly decreases until PL1 is engaged.
> 
> "Throttling" is not necessarily a bad word. All modern processors throttle as part of their normal operation for a reason or another (power limits, current limits, thermal limits, etc).



Yeah, I have no qualms whatsoever about throttling — everything is a trade off.  I don't want to hear the fan blowing hard ever.  That's my trade-off priority.

So if PL1=90, then why does HP even put 125 in the table?  That makes… no sense?  And I'd wager that PL2 is higher (maybe a lot higher) for i9 than for i7, which is the only thing I can think of that would explain the differences observed.

If HWInfo shows me that PL2 is (say) 250 or whatever, then I can try setting it to 190 which would presumably match the i7, or even lower just to keep things cooler/quieter.  Or really just bring it down to whatever I need it to be in practice.

Do OEM (eg HP) machines typically allow the use of Intel ETU?  I saw this in a Throttlestop guide:



> *TPL *is the Turbo Power Limit module, which is mostly useful for enabling Speed Shift on supported notebooks that don’t have it enabled in a BIOS update (i.e. the XPS 9550 and 9560). On some machines, some users have claimed to be able to set PL1 and PL2 limits through this module, though I personally have not been able to do so.


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 8, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> Yeah, I have no qualms whatsoever about throttling — everything is a trade off. I don't want to hear the fan blowing hard ever. That's my trade-off priority.
> 
> So if PL1=90, then why does HP even put 125 in the table? That makes… no sense? And I'd wager that PL2 is higher (maybe a lot higher) for i9 than for i7, which is the only thing I can think of that would explain the differences observed.
> 
> If HWInfo shows me that PL2 is (say) 250 or whatever, then I can try setting it to 190 which would presumably match the i7, or even lower just to keep things cooler/quieter. Or really just bring it down to whatever I need it to be in practice.



My guess is that they want to make it clear that it supports ordinary 125W desktop CPU parts. OEMs are allowed by Intel to use them at lower TDP if required (e.g. due to cooling limitations).

Yes, probably PL2 is higher than with the i7 to get better overall performance and better justify the price difference, although to get a comfortable noise level you will likely need to set it considerably lower than 190W.



kraiggers said:


> Do OEM (eg HP) machines typically allow the use of Intel ETU? I saw this in a Throttlestop guide:



I'm not sure. It can be that only some functions are enabled.


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## kraiggers (Nov 9, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> My guess is that they want to make it clear that it supports ordinary 125W desktop CPU parts. OEMs are allowed by Intel to use them at lower TDP if required (e.g. due to cooling limitations).
> 
> Yes, probably PL2 is higher than with the i7 to get better overall performance and better justify the price difference, although to get a comfortable noise level you will likely need to set it considerably lower than 190W.



I was re-watching this review, and I noticed they show the Intel XTU briefly at 8:02.  It has the PL1 at 90 — per the table you found earlier — and the PL2 for the i9 is at 241w.  It looks like you can't fiddle with the voltage or fan curve, but the PL1 and PL2 appear editable…?

So, in theory, I could set that to 190w and presumably match the i7 thermal envelope in this machine.  Or I could go even lower and really keep things cool, if necessary based on usage.  (And I could lower the Tau value from 128 sec to something much less.  But I have no sense of how that impacts heat.)

Which brings us back around to the original concept of the article — using the i9 at lower power thresholds is very doable, and can save a ton of heat for modest performance reduction. I mean, HP should never have put the i9 into this micro enclosure, and certainly not with PL2 at 241w.

Aside: The synthetic single core scores on Geekbench specific to this machine (not just the generic i9 and i7 chips) show an averaged 8% slower score for the i7.  1992 for the i9 and 1823 for the i7.  Lowering PL2 to 190 (same as the i7) would bring the performance of the i9 down some, but how much?  Does the lower base clock speed matter at all?  I suppose it doesn't matter — I will set PL2 and Tau to whatever is necessary to keep things quiet.  But it is pretty interesting stuff….

The price premium for i9 is a rip-off unless you have a seriously strong cooling system and/or don't mind a hurricane fan blower.  Which very few OEM machines — and certainly not this z2 mini g9 — have.


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## bug (Nov 9, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> I was re-watching this review, and I noticed they show the Intel XTU briefly at 8:02.  It has the PL1 at 90 — per the table you found earlier — and the PL2 for the i9 is at 241w.  It looks like you can't fiddle with the voltage or fan curve, but the PL1 and PL2 appear editable…?
> 
> So, in theory, I could set that to 190w and presumably match the i7 thermal envelope in this machine.  Or I could go even lower and really keep things cool, if necessary based on usage.  (And I could lower the Tau value from 128 sec to something much less.  But I have no sense of how that impacts heat.)


That is what I did to my 12600k, so absolutely possible.

I think I have it at 75/100W (but I'm not sure, it's been a while since I set it), with no visible performance penalty and a Freezer i34 that is rarely audible past the boot sequence.


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 9, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> So, in theory, I could set that to 190w and presumably match the i7 thermal envelope in this machine. Or I could go even lower and really keep things cool, if necessary based on usage. (And I could lower the Tau value from 128 sec to something much less. But I have no sense of how that impacts heat.)



Tau determines how much time the CPU tries to stay at PL2 before PL1 is engaged. It's a time constant, not an exact duration, so depending on operating conditions the effective time can be lower or higher than configured.

A strategy could be setting Tau to just a few seconds (as low as 2-4 seconds if needed) so that PL2 can get as high as it can for a brief period before fan speeds start to ramp up; this would be basically taking advantage of fan control inertia.



kraiggers said:


> Lowering PL2 to 190 (same as the i7) would bring the performance of the i9 down some, but how much? Does the lower base clock speed matter at all? I suppose it doesn't matter — I will set PL2 and Tau to whatever is necessary to keep things quiet. But it is pretty interesting stuff….



CPU performance should decrease very much non-linearly with power, and mostly in multithreaded loads, so in practice you might not notice too much difference unless you're only doing rendering-type workloads. A while back I tried doing a test in this regard with my 12700K configured to 5.0 GHz, decreasing power limits. The 12900K will likely have a similar trend:





The base clock is the minimum guaranteed clock that the CPU is supposed to maintain at base power (usually 125W for 125W TDP CPUs) at 100 °C in a worst-case workload without AVX instructions and worst-case silicon quality. At 90W the base clock would be lower, but how much it's not clear.


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## bug (Nov 9, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> Tau determines how much time the CPU tries to stay at PL2 before PL1 is engaged. It's a time constant, not an exact duration, so depending on operating conditions the effective time can be lower or higher than configured.


It will stay lower than tau in PL2 if you don't have sufficient cooling, but it's not supposed to stay longer than tau under any circumstances.


Solid State Brain said:


> A strategy could be setting Tau to just a few seconds (as low as 2-4 seconds if needed) so that PL2 can get as high as it can for a brief period before fan speeds start to ramp up; this would be basically taking advantage of fan control inertia.


That's a strategy, all right. A strategy to fry your CPU, but a strategy nonetheless.

Best explanation that I know of: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13544/why-intel-processors-draw-more-power-than-expected-tdp-turbo


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 9, 2022)

bug said:


> It will stay lower than tau in PL2 if you don't have sufficient cooling, but it's not supposed to stay longer than tau under any circumstances.



This is wrong. Tau is not a fixed time, it's used to calculate the so-called Exponentially-Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) used by the CPU for determining when PL1 should be engaged. As an example, if you set Tau to 8 seconds, PL1 is 125W and PL2 is 150W, the CPU will maintain PL2 for about 14 seconds. This duration largely depends on the difference between current package power (which may or may not be fixed at PL2) and PL1.



 






bug said:


> That's a strategy, all right. A strategy to fry your CPU, but a strategy nonetheless.



Wrong. With the PL2 at 241W and Tau=128s as reported earlier by kraiggers, the CPU is already going as high as it can. TjMax (by default 100 °C) is the limiting factor here. CPU power will be progressively decreased (that is, throttled) to maintain the temperature fixed at the temperature limit, and as it does so, fan speed ramps up.

By decreasing Tau to just a few seconds and keeping PL2 the same, the CPU will engage PL1 much earlier, ideally before fan speeds start accelerating. This would yield a _lower_ thermal and electrical load than the default configuration.


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## kraiggers (Nov 9, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> This is wrong. Tau is not a fixed time, it's used to calculate the so-called Exponentially-Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) used by the CPU for determining when PL1 should be engaged. As an example, if you set Tau to 8 seconds, PL1 is 125W and PL2 is 150W, the CPU will maintain PL2 for about 14 seconds. This duration largely depends on the difference between current package power (which may or may not be fixed at PL2) and PL1.
> 
> Wrong. With the PL2 at 241W and Tau=128s as reported earlier by kraiggers, the CPU is already going as high as it can. TjMax (by default 100 °C) is the limiting factor here. CPU power will be progressively decreased (that is, throttled) to maintain the temperature fixed at the temperature limit, and as it does so, fan speed ramps up.
> 
> By decreasing Tau to just a few seconds and keeping PL2 the same, the CPU will engage PL1 much earlier, ideally before fan speeds start accelerating. This would yield a _lower_ thermal and electrical load than the default configuration.



Let me see if I can clarify how this applies to my situation...

According to what I've seen online, I *think* the default settings for this HP z2 mini g9 are PL1=90w PL2= 241w and Tau=128s for the i9k, and same except PL2=190w for i7k.





Reviews have ALL mentioned this machine getting notably *hot* and also therefore *loud* under load with the i9 — all the review units have the i9, apparently — and also throttling both power and thermally.  This is with the OEM setup already starting with PL1=90w for both i7 and i9, even though PL1 doesn't matter as much under a full testing load.  One would assume the cooling in this tiny chassis is insufficient for these chips.  Which isn't very surprising — its tiny!

*Assuming I am able to set PL2  and Tau with the XTU,* the optimal settings for me — preferencing quiet operation over all-out performance — will depend on the workloads I'm doing (cad and adobe, mostly):

     If my work is bursty but not so much sustained, I could in theory keep the PL2 somewhat higher (eg 190w like i7k) but control the fan by lowering the Tau and therefore keeping the temps from going too high by throttling down the cpu before things get too hot and the fan goes gonzo.

     If my work is more sustained (renders or such line), I would probably need to lower PL2 more aggressively (eg, 125w or whatever low value) while keeping Tau higher to allow the best sustained performance while also holding down the temps to something the fans can handle at acceptable speeds (ie not 7000 rpm!) without getting too loud.

The sweet spot may in fact be some combination of both lowering PL2 more than 190w (like, say to 150w) and ALSO lowering Tau to some value less than 128s — maybe 30s or something.  Who knows, I'm just wild-ass guessing until I have the system in hand to experiment.  Start high and adjust incrementally; I may not need to do much at all (besides lowering PL2 to 190w) depending on my usage...

Is that a reasonable and accurate description of the situation?

Tangential question — is it worth keeping this order (i9k, 64gb ecc ram, 1 tb ssd, 2nd ssd slot open, rtx a2000) at $1495 incl tax?  That seems like a freakishly good price, even for a thermally crippled machine?  I *LIKE* the tiny footprint, I'm not gaming, and I'm not doing hardcore video or rendering, generally.


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 9, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> [...] Is that a reasonable and accurate description of the situation?



In general, yes. If can use a lower PL2, peak CPU core temperatures should be lower (or at least not reach the limit as quickly) and you should in turn be able to use a longer Tau without the cooling fan spinning rapidly too early. However, this depends also on how the fan is controlled on your system.


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## kraiggers (Nov 9, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> In general, yes. If can use a lower PL2, peak CPU core temperatures should be lower and you should in turn be able to use a longer Tau without the fans spinning rapidly too early. However, this depends also on how fans are controlled on your system.



E.g. is there actually a fan *curve*, or does the firmware just slam the fans to 100% once the temp crosses some threshold?  I don't know.  None of the reviews actually address this.  And my understanding is fan control is *not available* in the bios nor through XTU.  Awesome.

The easiest solution to achieve my goal would be if I could set a *max* fan speed in the bios and let the system dynamically adjust the performance.  Ha ha!  Why would anyone care about *THAT*?!


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 9, 2022)

As far as I am aware of, the Intel-suggested fan control behavior is to ramp up fan speed linearly from 80 °C to 100 °C, perhaps it's what happens in your case.
If so, keeping temperatures below 80°C or not much above that should help.

Check out here: https://edc.intel.com/content/www/u...1-of-2/009/fan-speed-control-scheme-with-dts/


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## kraiggers (Nov 9, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> As far as I am aware of, the Intel-suggested fan control behavior is to ramp up fan speed linearly from 80 °C to 100 °C, perhaps it's what happens in your case.
> If so, keeping temperatures below 80°C or not much above that should help.
> 
> Check out here: https://edc.intel.com/content/www/u...1-of-2/009/fan-speed-control-scheme-with-dts/



I don't know if HP uses 90 as TDP in this scenario, or 125 (sticker on the fan unit) or 241 (PL2 for i9).  The lower the value they use, the steeper the slope and that means the fan would cycle from zero to full speed under load very quickly?  Which kind of tracks with the reviews?

Or to put it another way, the system passes along the slope from zero to the max fan speed very quickly from idle to load, because the PL2 is (at i9k stock setting of 241w) so much higher than the base TDP=PL1=90.

In a perfect world, you would want the cooling capacity of the system to match the TDP envelope of the PL2.  That's why crazy fancy liquid cooling exists.  In the real world, with more mixed workloads, that isn't really necessary — at least not for the cost trade-off.  But laptops and SFF boxes are obviously very hostile environments for hot processors and cooling systems.

I suspect, for my quiet running preference, I will have to set PL2 to something between 125 and 190.  Even at 175, it would keep 95% performance at a much lower temp.  It will be an experimentation to find the right number, I guess.


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 9, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> I don't know if HP uses 90 as TDP in this scenario, or 125 (sticker on the fan unit) or 241 (PL2 for i9). The lower the value they use, the steeper the slope and that means the fan would cycle from zero to full speed under load very quickly? Which kind of tracks with the reviews?



According to Intel datasheets, CPU case (IHS / integrated heat spreader) temperature on the i9-12900K should not exceed 61.9 °C. This is not a temperature end-users can easily measure as it needs a thermocouple installed on a groove machined at the geometrical center of the IHS.

It can be assumed that the manufacturer of your system (HP) will have calibrated fan control so that at a sustained power of 90W the CPU will not exceed 61.9 °C at the IHS under worst-case scenarios, and that under transient conditions at higher power this will not be exceeded (not too much, at least). This constraint is perhaps the main reason why the system is noisy.

Core temperatures will be higher than IHS temperatures (possibly in the order of 20–25 °C higher under sustained conditions at the thermal limit), and have much lower (almost no) thermal inertia compared to IHS temperatures.



kraiggers said:


> In a perfect world, you would want the cooling capacity of the system to match the TDP envelope of the PL2. That's why crazy fancy liquid cooling exists. In the real world, with more mixed workloads, that isn't really necessary — at least not for the cost trade-off. But laptops and SFF boxes are obviously very hostile environments for hot processors and cooling systems.



In principle, coolers designed for a specific TDP can temporarily dissipate a higher power, which is why PL1 and PL2 exist. That was the the basic reasoning behind the turbo boost algorithm, although it's mainly valid for thermally-constrained systems like laptops, and over the years it has been exploited for obtaining better benchmark scores in reviews.

On desktop parts with much larger coolers I see this mostly useful to keep the system at suitable noise and efficiency levels. My Noctua NH-D15s could dissipate 230W or more at unreasonable noise levels, so under load I keep my i7-12700k CPU around 150W on average on the short term (dynamically variable due to the low 85 °C thermal limit I configured) and 125W on the long term.



kraiggers said:


> I suspect, for my quiet running preference, I will have to set PL2 to something between 125 and 190. Even at 175, it would keep 95% performance at a much lower temp. It will be an experimentation to find the right number, I guess.



Note that those values will be mostly valid for a properly cooled i9-12900k. With a cooler designed for dissipating continuously at most 90/125W, average power under load will likely already be much lower than the 241W PL2. So, I expect you will need to set PL2 closer to 125W to actually see differences.


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## kraiggers (Nov 9, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> It can be assumed that the manufacturer of your system (HP) will have calibrated fan control so that at a sustained power of 90W the CPU will not exceed 61.9 °C at the IHS under worst-case scenarios, and that under transient conditions at higher power this will not be exceeded (not too much, at least). This constraint is perhaps this is the main reason why the system is noisy.
> 
> Note that those values will be mostly valid for a properly cooled i9-12900k. With a cooler designed for dissipating continuously at most 90/125W, average power under load will likely already be much lower than the 241W PL2. So, I expect you will need to set PL2 closer to 125W to actually see differences.



So, in the HP with stock 90, 241 settings, a reviewer or user puts the system under load.  The  boost is allowed to ping 241, the system gets warmer, the fan ramps to max over some amount of time (a minute? two? less?) then system is thermally and/or power throttled back to 90 steady state, while the fan is still at max, because thats the  thermal envelope of the (cooling) system.

With 90, [125-190] settings, the same thing happens, just… slower?  I need to find the PL2 that will keep the system quiet at all times (perhaps 125 as you suggest), or possibly something slightly higher based on medium (but not zero) fan speed and/or my possibly less sustained workloads.

Do you think this might be what the 'quiet mode' in the HP bios does?  Just set PL2 to a lower (125 or whatever) value?  I guess I can find out once I have it...


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## bug (Nov 9, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> So, in the HP with stock 90, 241 settings, a reviewer or user puts the system under load.  The  boost is allowed to ping 241, the system gets warmer, the fan ramps to max over some amount of time (a minute? two? less?) then system is thermally and/or power throttled back to 90 steady state, while the fan is still at max, because thats the  thermal envelope of the (cooling) system.
> 
> With 90, [125-190] settings, the same thing happens, just… slower?  I need to find the PL2 that will keep the system quiet at all times (perhaps 125 as you suggest), or possibly something slightly higher based on medium (but not zero) fan speed and/or my possibly less sustained workloads.
> 
> Do you think this might be what the 'quiet mode' in the HP bios does?  Just set PL2 to a lower (125 or whatever) value?  I guess I can find out once I have it...


Basically yes, maybe.

PL1 is what the system can sustain indefinitely. PL2 is kind of boost of a boost. It will go beyond what your cooler can handle, but stop after a while, allowing the cooler to get the temperature back in check.

That said, if you don't have a top-notch cooler, you probably won't see any difference because both 241 and 190 will be above what the cooler can handle. This part varies from one user to another. Even if two users have the same cooler, there can still be differences because of different airflows. So it's pretty hard to guess what _you_ will. Better try it and see how it goes.


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 9, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> So, in the HP with stock 90, 241 settings, a reviewer or user puts the system under load. The boost is allowed to ping 241, the system gets warmer, the fan ramps to max over some amount of time (a minute? two? less?) then system is thermally and/or power throttled back to 90 steady state, while the fan is still at max, because thats the thermal envelope of the (cooling) system.



At 241W (if the CPU is even allowed enough current to reach this level, but let's assume it can) CPU core temperature will likely hit 100 °C very quickly, almost immediately. Fan speed will then increase accordingly, probably reaching the maximum speed within _seconds_ depending on how the manufacturer configured its behavior. At the same time, package power will start decreasing from 241W to lower levels. Eventually, PL1 is engaged and fans should decrease to the minimum speed required to keep the CPU case (IHS) below specification temperature.

Just to have an idea, below is data from stress test I made a while back with my system, with the CPU temperature limit at 90 °C and PL2 at 190W (click to enlarge). You can see that the 190W package power is only reached for a brief while due to the temperature limit, then decreases. When PL1 is engaged (set at 125W), core temperature jumps down significantly. You might expect a similar behavior on your system, only with power decreasing even faster due to smaller cooler.





kraiggers said:


> With 90, [125-190] settings, the same thing happens, just… slower? I need to find the PL2 that will keep the system quiet at all times (perhaps 125 as you suggest), or possibly something slightly higher based on medium (but not zero) fan speed and/or my possibly less sustained workloads.



If you set PL2 to a lower value the maximum temperature reached should be lower or reached slower. Difficult to say how much because it's system-dependent.



kraiggers said:


> Do you think this might be what the 'quiet mode' in the HP bios does? Just set PL2 to a lower (125 or whatever) value? I guess I can find out once I have it...



Could be. Many GPUs also have a "quiet mode" which decreases performance somewhat and lowers fan speed/noise.


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## kraiggers (Nov 9, 2022)

bug said:


> That said, if you don't have a top-notch cooler, you probably won't see any difference because both 241 and 190 will be above what the cooler can handle. This part varies from one user to another. Even if two users have the same cooler, there can still be differences because of different airflows. So it's pretty hard to guess what _you_ will. Better try it and see how it goes.



I thinks it's pretty fair to say the HP oem doesn't have a top notch cooler.  It may not be trash, but i'm not expecting anything impressive let alone good. If it was, there would be less issues with noise in these tests.  I'd be happy to spend a little money to improve it, but I think this system is too new and almost certainly too corporate to have any aftermarket cooling solutions.

I'm feeling somewhat encouraged, honestly.  If I can manually set the PL2 and Tau — hopefully — then I'm sure there is a combination of the two numbers that will keep things acceptably quiet.  If I can't, then i'll use the bios 'quiet mode' and hope for the best.

The price I (somehow?) got is too good to cancel, I think?



Solid State Brain said:


> Just to have an idea, below is data from stress test I made a while back with my system, with the CPU temperature limit at 90 °C and PL2 at 190W (click to enlarge). You can see that the 190W package power is only reached for a brief while due to the temperature limit, then decreases. When PL1 is engaged (set at 125W), core temperature jumps down significantly. You might expect a similar behavior on your system, only with power decreasing even faster due to smaller cooler.



Setting a max temp would be just as good (a proxy really) for setting a max fan speed, neither of which I can do on this system, I'm pretty sure.  Adjusting the PL2 and Tau is really the more specific way of achieving that goal, though it will require experimentation to find the correct values for me.


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## bug (Nov 9, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> I thinks it's pretty fair to say the HP oem doesn't have a top notch cooler.  It may not be trash, but i'm not expecting anything impressive let alone good. If it was, there would be less issues with noise in these tests.  I'd be happy to spend a little money to improve it, but I think this system is too new and almost certainly too corporate to have any aftermarket cooling solutions.
> 
> I'm feeling somewhat encouraged, honestly.  If I can manually set the PL2 and Tau — hopefully — then I'm sure there is a combination of the two numbers that will keep things acceptably quiet.  If I can't, then i'll use the bios 'quiet mode' and hope for the best.
> 
> The price I (somehow?) got is too good to cancel, I think?


Like I said, I did it on 12600k with a Freezer i34 (good, but not top-notch) cooler. You will just need to lower PL2 well under 190W and maybe lower PL1 as well. Just try different levels, don't be phased if you lower PL2 a little and don't see a change, that's all I'm saying.


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## kraiggers (Nov 9, 2022)

bug said:


> Like I said, I did it on 12600k with a Freezer i34 (good, but not top-notch) cooler. You will just need to lower PL2 well under 190W and maybe lower PL1 as well. Just try different levels, don't be phased if you lower PL2 a little and don't see a change, that's all I'm saying.



Gotcha.  That's good to know.  Solid State Brain suggested something closer to 125 would probably be necessary.  So, between the two of you, my expectations are calibrated pretty low!

It's fascinating to me that reviewers seem to be getting very impressive results from this system in benchmarks.  Even with the fans maxed and loud AF, they are still significantly thermally and power constrained.

So, with that in mind, taking a very small performance hit (limiting PL2 to 125 or thereabouts) wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for a super quiet system.  See this article that speaks to this scenario.


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## Nopa (Nov 9, 2022)

13900KS @6Ghz should push the power consumption to 370-390W in total usage.


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 9, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> Setting a max temp would be just as good (a proxy really) for setting a max fan speed, neither of which I can do on this system, I'm pretty sure. Adjusting the PL2 and Tau is really the more specific way of achieving that goal, though it will require experimentation to find the correct values for me.



The problem with PL2 in this regard is that lowering it won't affect high core temperatures due to intense single- or few-threaded workloads. So, the fan could still spin up rapidly while the CPU is at a relatively low power, since it will react to the highest reported temperature inside the package (generally speaking; could be different on some configurations).


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## kraiggers (Nov 9, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> The problem with PL2 in this regard is that lowering it won't affect high core temperatures due to intense single- or few-threaded workloads. So, the fan could still spin up rapidly while the CPU is at a relatively low power, since it will react to the highest reported temperature inside the package (generally speaking; could be different on some configurations).



I see what you mean. But I don't have a specific solution for that.  Hopefully that's not how it behaves.

I have seen some of the reviews imply the fan lags a bit, or perhaps doesn't scale gradually with load, but then spins up rapidly.  So maybe — if I'm lucky — by holding down the overall system temp by reducing PL2 and/or Tau, the fan hopefully won't ever get crazy.  I mean, its the only lever I have to pull, so...

In your scenario, I'd have to set PL2 to something *really* low like 90? And it STILL might not solve the problem.

I don't see reviews obsessing over the fan noise, just mentioning it is quite loud at load and as a notable 'con'.  In the world of corporate provided review units, it's hard to calibrate  how big of a factor that really is.  I'm assuming it will be an issue (for me), but if was a major major fiasco, the reviews would say so?


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 9, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> In your scenario, I'd have to set PL2 to something *really* low like 90? And it STILL might not solve the problem.



Probably to something like 40W or less to have an effect on single-core power draw, which is not desirable. A better alternative would be decreasing the maximum CPU frequency for single- or few-threaded workloads from 5.2 to 4.9 GHz or so. But do try the system in practice first, before thinking of doing this.


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## Mussels (Nov 10, 2022)

Solid state brain:

You've got the handle on some stupidly complex math there. I'd just follow what you're saying.

(Lower the settings, undervolt if you can)



kraiggers said:


> I don't see reviews obsessing over the fan noise, just mentioning it is quite loud at load and as a notable 'con'


Reviews are always really really prone to avoiding cons, you gotta mention them but unless the products trash tier garbage they'll never bluntly say something is outright shite
"Oh its noisy but that's acceptable in this form factor" "People know this before buying" etc

(And hence why my SFF systems are dual/quad cores, the ONLY way to reduce fan noise is by lower total wattages)


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## bug (Nov 10, 2022)

Mussels said:


> (And hence why my SFF systems are dual/quad cores, *the ONLY way to reduce fan noise is by lower total wattages*)


I mean, if you're too cheap to throw some LN2 in there...


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## kraiggers (Nov 10, 2022)

Mussels said:


> Reviews are always really really prone to avoiding cons, you gotta mention them but unless the products trash tier garbage they'll never bluntly say something is outright shite
> "Oh its noisy but that's acceptable in this form factor" "People know this before buying" etc



Yes, exactly this.  So, I know this SFF can get loud.  However, I also know that reviews skew heavily to max load and game testing.  I won't be gaming, and I am extremely unlikely to be doing any rendering or video work.  So I shouldn't be putting this machine under the conditions most likely to produce those noisy conditions.



Mussels said:


> (And hence why my SFF systems are dual/quad cores, the ONLY way to reduce fan noise is by lower total wattages)



And also why I've been thinking and discussing how to use lower wattage settings to limit any thermal / fan / noise spikes, even in my more modest usage patterns.  I may even lower PL1 a tad depending on how things go; its on the table. 

It's also possible that the bios setting for 'quiet mode' does exactly what I want.  It sure would be nice if someone tried THAT in a review.  But no one seems to care about quiet running?

I'm hopeful that I can find a sweet spot where this machine will be my goldilocks: small, quiet, and fast for my typical usage.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Nov 10, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> Yes, exactly this.  So, I know this SFF can get loud.  However, I also know that reviews skew heavily to max load and game testing.  I won't be gaming, and I am extremely unlikely to be doing any rendering or video work.  So I shouldn't be putting this machine under the conditions most likely to produce those noisy conditions.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Why buy an i9 in the first place, it sounds like a i5 would have suited your use case and profile considerably better than what you bought. 

Disable the E core's, manually set 90 watts max usage and undervolt it, you don't need the performance so just throw that potential in the bin by configuring it as a lower spec chip.


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## kraiggers (Nov 10, 2022)

New question: Why are there no 5k displays available that are made for PCs (and not just targeted to macs)?

I have an LG 34" 5k2k that is pretty nice, but it's not full 5k.  I was also considering using either two Studio Display (5k) or Ultrafine (5k).  I can drive (1) up-to-8k panel via the i9 built-in 770 graphics and displayport 1.4.  (I think I could just use a cable to adapt the full size displayport to a usb-c end to go into the SD or Ultrafine?)

But to get a second (or third) display at 5k+ I'd have to aggregate two of the mini-displayport together on the back of the rtx a2000 (which has four - which could theoretically drive two more 5k+ displays?).  EXCEPT that I can't find ANY 5k+ displays with two video inputs!?  Is this a situation that requires a docking port to do the aggregation — is that even a thing?

And just for more funsies, I ordered my machine with the optional thunderbolt 3 port.  So, maybe that could drive a second 5k display?  BUT, I can't find ANY information that clarifies whether that port outputs from the 770, (two streams) directly from the a2000 gpu, neither, or if its somehow selectable?

I mean, this isn't that important — the 34" display is really nice, and will serve my needs well.  But, I'd love to know what's possible so I could at least consider multiple 5k — that would be a significant improvement over a single 5k2k!



TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Why buy an i9 in the first place, it sounds like a i5 would have suited your use case and profile considerably better than what you bought.
> 
> Disable the E core's, manually set 90 watts max usage and undervolt it, you don't need the performance so just throw that potential in the bin by configuring it as a lower spec chip.



I'm a mac guy, and I'm pretty ignorant about PC stuff.  I need a PC workstation for WFH for CAD.  Cad on mac is OK, but not full feature parity.  Also, Cad doesn't run on arm/apple silicon, so i'm not sure there is a viable future runway for CAD on mac.

I really like the the z2 mini g9 small footprint; easy to open etc.  Basically, I was dumb and foolishly ordered the top bin chip, not realizing how crippling the enclosure would be and the consequences for thermals and (potential) noise.  I got an incredible price (I think?) on my order: i9k, 64gb ecc, 1 tb fast ssd, rtx a2000 for $1495 incl. tax, direct from HP with 3 yr warranty.  However, now they won't allow me to downgrade the processor with outright cancelling the order, and that price is no longer available.  I guess they use a dynamic pricing algorithm, and their customer service is apparently shit?

So, that's why I've been discussing with the folks here how I might adjust the settings to get a performance envelope that is more suited to my use and preferences (quiet).  I'm optimistic that adjusting PL1 and PL2 will allow me to find a sweet spot, if I even need to do anything at all.

And, even thermally / power throttled, this little machine will still *utterly obliterate* any machine I've ever used (supplied by companies for whom I've worked).  They're all cheap AF.


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## bug (Nov 10, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> New question: Why are there no 5k displays available that are made for PCs (and not just targeted to macs)?


That one is simple, really: video cards can't game at 5k. Thus, 5k panels are confined to professional usage for the time being and you won't find many of them in typical consumer products.


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## Mussels (Nov 11, 2022)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Why buy an i9 in the first place, it sounds like a i5 would have suited your use case and profile considerably better than what you bought.
> 
> Disable the E core's, manually set 90 watts max usage and undervolt it, you don't need the performance so just throw that potential in the bin by configuring it as a lower spec chip.


^ This
You cant review and judge the hardware if the CPU is user changeable
Maxed out settings on an i5 is going to be quieter than a PL1 limited i9 (and likely faster)


Oh and PC's can totally game at 5K, easily with DLSS involved. I game at 4K 165 at present using DLSS.

The reason we dont have 5k or 8k high refresh displays is because displayport and HDMI tech havent caught up enough yet, they're using compression at the moment to get what we currently have.


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## kraiggers (Nov 11, 2022)

Mussels said:


> Maxed out settings on an i5 is going to be quieter than a PL1 limited i9 (and likely faster)


Yes, well, unfortunately I can't get customer service from HP to match the pricing I got, or I would switch down in a hot second.  

I mean, if the i9 is really just *intolerably* loud, I can always sell the machine and buy something different.  I hope that isn't necessary, for a number of reasons, hence my discussions here.  Reviews are useful, but you never *really* know until you have the thing sitting in front of you doing the work, and making the tweaks...


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## kraiggers (Nov 12, 2022)

Interesting turn of events… I guess HP must have their dynamic pricing bottom out on the weekends; I can get the low pricing today that I had last week, _*if I'm willing to wait until mid January*_ for the machine!

Dropping to an i7k shaves off another $100, and dropping to an i5k shaves off almost $200.  I'm not that worked up over the cost — over the lifespan of this machine, one or two hundred bucks doesn't matter that much.  (And, I guess it's built such that I could drop in a future chip that was faster / more efficient?)

Anyway, the i7k review shows a 15% synthetic performance boost over the i5k, while also running cooler under load.  But I don't know how meaningful that is since those data are using all three chips in their 'stock' configuration.

In my preferred oem machine, *all three chip configs are set with LP1=90*; while LP2=241 for i9k, LP2=190 for i7k, and LP2=150 for the i5k.  None of the reviews or tests really show what I'd like to know:

- how would the i9k compare to the i7k with the same LP2=190?
- how would both the i9k and i7k compare to the i5k with all three set to LP2=150?
- how would all three compare at LP2=125?

The only hard data I have from this review (9:00) where they actually put a stock i7k *into this machine* and it benched *faster* than the i9k for rendering stuff, and pretty close to even frame rates at CS:GO.  That's super interesting, and clearly something more than just LP2 limiting is going on… Presumably due to the lower LP1=90 limit for both chips, and throttling encountered under load.

I've read multiple articles (including this one) and also here — that discuss power limiting the i9k.  But neither of them discuss the tradeoffs of that relative to a (_similarly limited_) i7k or i5k.  So I'm left to wonder (money notwithstanding) why someone would choose an i5k or i7k vs a power-limited i9k?

Obviously, I'd prefer to have the fastest machine possible while remaining quiet.  But what does that mean — stock i5k? stock i7k? LP2 throttled i9k?  The best option I can surmise in the absence of more information is to get the i7k (and still potentially drop the LP2 down the road, but probably not need to)...

Thoughts/advice?


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 12, 2022)

The bigger chip (i.e. with more cores) should always get better MT performance for the same power limit. Intel i9 CPUs also tend to be better binned than lower SKUs, requiring less voltage on average for the same frequency.

LTT results at 9:00 in the video, in particular for rendering, make no sense—I suspect other problems there.


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## kraiggers (Nov 12, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> The bigger chip (i.e. with more cores) should always get better MT performance for the same power limit. Intel i9 CPUs also tend to be better binned than lower SKUs, requiring less voltage on average for the same frequency.
> 
> LTT results at 9:00 in the video, in particular for rendering, make no sense—I suspect other problems there.



You're saying the rendering results are not what you would expect?  Maybe putting the retail i7k in there somehow reset the LP1 to 125?  Or maybe the additional i9k cores generated enough extra heat that the clock had to go down to stay within the LP1=90 limit, diminishing overall MT performance compared to the i7k?  I don't know its weird, which is why they put it in the video, I think?

So what would you do in my situation?  Keep the i9k order and lower the LP2 (if necessary)?  Or switch to an i7k order and save $100?



Mussels said:


> Maxed out settings on an i5 is going to be quieter than a PL1 limited i9 (and likely faster)



But that isn't my option — All three chip options have PL1=90.   I mean, I guess I could change that too, but I wasn't planning to do so.

How would a i5k compare to a SAME SPEC (PL1=90, PL2=150) i7k, and i9k?  Especially for less-heavily multi-core workloads. I would expect those loads to more or less scale with the core count? That's the type of apples-to-apples scenario that would actually help me choose!


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 12, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> You're saying the rendering results are not what you would expect? Maybe putting the retail i7k in there somehow reset the LP1 to 125? Or maybe the additional i9k cores generated enough extra heat that the clock had to go down to stay within the LP1=90 limit, diminishing overall MT performance compared to the i7k? I don't know its weird, which is why they put it in the video, I think?
> 
> So what would you do in my situation? Keep the i9k order and lower the LP2 (if necessary)? Or switch to an i7k order and save $100?



On shorter renders (BMW) the 12700K appeared to be almost twice as fast while on longer ones (Gooseberry CPU) the the 12900K was faster despite large short-term losses. I don't think changes in Tau and PL2 alone can justify such a difference. 

It seems as if the cooler-cpu thermal contact with the specific i9 that was in that HP was poor, while the i7 was better in this regard. There have indeed been reports of some 12th gen Intel CPUs slightly "bending" once installed and suffering from higher temperatures than normal (up to 10-15 °C in some cases), but not all were affected.

Or possibly it might have been a thermal paste issue, and the i7 tested was installed with something better (or better applied) than what the i9 came with from the factory. Difficult to tell for sure without more information.

Personally, if money was not an issue I would get the i9 and limit PL2/Tau to the same level of the i7 or less. It should be always faster for the same power draw, assuming that there are no BIOS-related issues with the i9 on that system.


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## kraiggers (Nov 12, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> Or possibly it might have been a thermal paste issue, and the i7 tested was installed with something better (or better applied) than what the i9 came with from the factory. Difficult to tell for sure without more information.



You wouldn't put too much import on that one anecdotal sample?  (And, also, the frame rate in the games test was pretty similar, FWIW.)



Solid State Brain said:


> Personally, if money was not an issue I would get the i9 and limit PL2/Tau to the same level of the i7 or less. It should be always faster for the same power draw, assuming that there are no BIOS-related issues with the i9 on that system.



Faster because i9k has more cores and larger cache?  Does the lower base clock (3.2ghz vs 3.6ghz) mean the i9k suffers compared to i7k for single core performance, holding power draw constant?

The $100 delta is not a deal-breaker.  I feel equally great about the price, wither its $1400 for the i9k system, or $1300 for the i7k system.  What kind of BIO-related issues might crop up?

Is it in any way meaningful that none of the 3rd party sales channels (eg B&H etc) sell an i9k config?  They all top out at i7k...


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 12, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> You wouldn't put too much import on that one anecdotal sample?  (And, also, the frame rate in the games test was pretty similar, FWIW.)



No, especially since this is from LTT, which is more of an entertainment show compared to other techtubers.



kraiggers said:


> Faster because i9k has more cores and larger cache?  Does the lower base clock (3.2ghz vs 3.6ghz) mean the i9k suffers compared to i7k for single core performance, holding power draw constant?
> The $100 delta is not a deal-breaker.  I feel equally great about the price, wither its $1400 for the i9k system, or $1300 for the i7k system.



The i9-12900K should be faster due to slightly higher frequencies (5.2 vs 5.0 GHz on single core, 4.9 vs 4.7 GHz all-core), larger number of cores (mostly important in MT loads), and better binning (lower voltages at the same frequencies). Keeping power draw the same, it should be faster all-around than a typical i7-12700K.

The base clock is just a guaranteed minimum frequency that the CPU should be able to attain in all-core MT loads without AVX instructions at a specific "base" power (125W). It does not affect single-core performance. The more cores, the lower the base clock will be for the same base power.



kraiggers said:


> What kind of BIOS-related issues might crop up?
> Is it in any way meaningful that none of the 3rd party sales channels (eg B&H etc) sell an i9k config?  They all top out at i7k...



BIOS-related issues could be for example aggressive voltages by the motherboard when it detects an i9, which could make it throttle earlier.

I don't know what to make of the default CPU selection for this HP. Perhaps vendors expect that most users won't need the best CPU available in a small form factor system.


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## kraiggers (Nov 12, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> Keeping power draw the same, it should be faster all-around than a typical i7-12700K.



So to be clear, there is no reason (other than cost) not to get the i9, as long as I’m willing to dial down the PL2 to ameliorate heat+noise, which appears to be possible thanks to XTU.

And the upside is marginally better performance — at constant power — than the i7k or i5k.


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## Mussels (Nov 13, 2022)

You're missing that 90W is going to get you higher clock speeds out of a lesser amount of cores
A 6 core at 90W is going to run full performance, while an i9 is going to throttle extremely hard


If you already have the i9, the best you can do is improve the cooling somehow - you cant lower voltages on a locked BIOS, so you're stuck with it how it is


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## kraiggers (Nov 13, 2022)

Mussels said:


> You're missing that 90W is going to get you higher clock speeds out of a lesser amount of cores
> A 6 core at 90W is going to run full performance, while an i9 is going to throttle extremely hard
> 
> If you already have the i9, the best you can do is improve the cooling somehow - you cant lower voltages on a locked BIOS, so you're stuck with it how it is



Are you saying that an i5k is faster than an i7k which is faster than an i9k below some low power level threshold (eg 100w)?  Especially for multi core loads?  That's somewhat counter-intuitive, but not inconceivable, I guess?  If that's true, then why does anyone ever buy the high-spec chips for SFF or laptops?

Let me see if I understand you with a hypothetical example on our throttled 90w PL1 machine (PL2 wouldn't matter for a load test) —
     In theory, a 6 P-core i5k at 90w would probably run single core at the full 4.9ghz, and all six cores at maybe 3.2ghz.
     An 8 P-core i9k could maybe run a single core at full 5.2ghz but all eight cores at maybe 2.4ghz

So in that type of scenario, the i9k might be marginally faster at single-core tasks, but potentially slower at multi-core tasks, depending on the exact number of cores utilized?  The numbers are made up but is that the concept you are describing?  I guess the question how much does more cores (in the i9k) compensate for a lowered average frequency when many (or all) of them are being utilized?

[SIZE=4]Solid State Brain[/SIZE] suggested the best option was getting an i9k and manually throttling PL2 to control max heat.  That sounds to me, within a thermally and power throttled SFF, like preferencing single core performance over multi core.  Do you disagree?  If so, can you elaborate with a bit more specificity?​


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## Mussels (Nov 13, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> Are you saying that an i5k is faster than an i7k which is faster than an i9k below some low power level threshold (eg 100w)?  Especially for multi core loads?  That's somewhat counter-intuitive, but not inconceivable, I guess?  If that's true, then why does anyone ever buy the high-spec chips for SFF or laptops?
> 
> Let me see if I understand you with a hypothetical example on our throttled 90w PL1 machine (PL2 wouldn't matter for a load test) —
> In theory, a 6 P-core i5k at 90w would probably run single core at the full 4.9ghz, and all six cores at maybe 3.2ghz.
> ...


If you're splitting 100W between four cores, they get 25W each
between 8, they get 12.5W

It's basic math
There is no preferencing of ST over MT or anything like that - simply that the more cores are active the slower they will all be



This is the core of my entire problem with the current intel lineups (and the top AM5 CPUs) is that with such high power requirements, the moment you dont have the power available or the cooling, performance goes to shit.


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## kraiggers (Nov 13, 2022)

> Mussels said:
> This is the core of my entire problem with the current intel lineups (and the top AM5 CPUs) is that with such high power requirements, the moment you dont have the power available or the cooling, performance goes to shit.



If the math was that simple, then every one of these chips would bench the same single core performance at the same power level, wouldn't it? 

According to the article intro, PL1 doesn't matter anymore?  Then the closest thing I could find to this scenario is also in the original article. The PL1=PL2=190 version of the i9k is slightly to meaningfully faster than a i7 (at stock PL2=190) in almost every test that was run, across single- and multi-core apps.  There were a *small* number where the i7 was minimally faster or a push.

Now, maybe a lower power threshold (eg PL1=PL2=90) for *both* chips changes that outcome?  We don’t really know.

But the (admittedly very minimal) evidence I have found suggests the i9 would be as fast or faster than the i7 at the same power levels.  Which is consistent with Solid State Brain‘s recommendation.

Unless I’m missing some tests or data that suggest otherwise?

Hey, I just want to get the best chip for my situation.  Fast *and* quiet would be my preference!  No review I've seen says, Hey guys, the i5 or i7 is FASTER than the i9 in your baller laptop or SFF.  They sometimes say, hey the i5 or i7 is good enough and makes less heat or noise in a tough situation.  But in this SFF, all three would be power throttled, maybe to the same number, or maybe not.  I suppose there is a possibility that holding quiet operation as the constant, the i5 could comfortably run at say 150w (less cores) and the i7 could do 125w and the i9 at 100w.  Those are just speculative numbers.

But, then what was even the point of this article (what happens when you power throttle the i9) if the better option is to just use an i7 or i5?


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## Super Firm Tofu (Nov 13, 2022)

Mussels said:


> If you're splitting 100W between four cores, they get 25W each
> between 8, they get 12.5W
> 
> It's basic math
> ...



That's not how it works.  If that was the case, the 5950x would perform worse than the 5800x. They both have the exact same power budget.  The 5950x is almost twice as fast as the 5800x in multi-thread workloads using the same power.  Yes, maximum clock speed under all core load is lower, but it still does more work overall.

Also, power limiting (to a point) doesn't reduce single, or low thread performance as those loads don't approach the maximum power.

In the example above, it's better to have more cores with less power (per core) rather than fewer cores with more power (per core).

The entire premise of this article is that power use and performance do not scale linearly.


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## Mussels (Nov 13, 2022)

Super Firm Tofu said:


> That's not how it works.  If that was the case, the 5950x would perform worse than the 5800x. They both have the exact same power budget.  The 5950x is almost twice as fast as the 5800x in multi-thread workloads using the same power.  Yes, maximum clock speed under all core load is lower, but it still does more work overall.
> 
> Also, power limiting (to a point) doesn't reduce single, or low thread performance as those loads don't approach the maximum power.
> 
> ...


It is entirely how it works


If you throttle the system wattage down like this entire post is talking about

Go put a 5800x and 5950x down to 65W and compare the clock speeds in all core loads or AVX workloads.


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## InVasMani (Nov 13, 2022)

You can optimize frequency and VID across individual cores however for stairway scaling across additional cores of frequency which will improve wattage and in way that minimizes the issue you're overstating a bit however. Honestly it depends on the chips in question though for Alder Lake that won't work nearly as well as it will with Raptor Lake from a general standpoint though even in the case of Alder Lake it does work and you can inverse a bit how Intel positions them to operate for marketing purposes.


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 13, 2022)

Mussels said:


> You're missing that 90W is going to get you higher clock speeds out of a lesser amount of cores
> A 6 core at 90W is going to run full performance, while an i9 is going to throttle extremely hard



Clock speeds will indeed be lower in multithreaded workloads with the bigger chip, but MT performance will still be higher, since by running at lower frequencies the cores will run at more efficient levels.

For example, a typical i9-12900K at 125W scores about 24000 points and at 65W 17500 points with Cinebench R23. With my voltage-optimized i7-12700K I get ~22000 pts at 125W and ~16500 pts at 65W. I need to overclock my CPU and make it draw 230W or so to get about the same score the i9 gets at 125W.









						AMD Ryzen 9 7950X vs. Intel Core i9-12900K at 125W and 65W | Club386
					

What happens when you dial-down power limits? You might be surprised.




					www.club386.com
				








My own tests:


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## kraiggers (Nov 13, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> Clock speeds will indeed be lower in multithreaded workloads with the bigger chip, but MT performance will still be higher, since by running at lower frequencies the cores will run at more efficient levels.



I think I understand the non-linear nature of the performance curve.  That's why the i9k, even throttled down to lower power budgets, is faster both at single core AND (somewhat surprisingly) at multi-core workloads.  Though there aren't a ton of articles making that comparison, sadly.



There are two things I still don't really get that I think are relevant to this conversation...

First, does PL1 have _anything_ to do with these performance results?  Is that number meaningful anymore? From the introduction:



> Unlike past generations of processors that were constrained by the Tau time value to hold maximum power draw, or PL2, Alder Lake processors now run at maximum power draw indefinitely if the load demands it and as long as the processor doesn't hit the thermal limit of 105°C. This is done without inventing a new system; Intel simply tweaked the PL1 and PL2 values and set them both to 241 W, which effectively means the processor can run at 241 W all the time as long as it doesn't overheat. The "125 W" limit now only exists on paper and in marketing documents.



So in all these tests, _*unless specified otherwise*_, are we to assume that PL1=PL2=241w for i9k, PL1=PL2=190 for i7k, and PL1=PL2=150 for i5k?  So in the results for this article, the PL1=PL2=125 gets 86% performance, and the i7k gets 90% — _*but at PL1=PL2=190w*_ — right?





And, how does the performance of the chips change when PL1 is different than PL2?  Say, when PL1=90w (like in the oem HP)?  Maybe that doesn't matter since all three are set at the same PL1=90?


Second — and I guess related to what I wrote above — what are there thermal differences between the three chips (i5k, i7k, i9k) when run *at the same power levels*?  Or, another way, can the i7k run at a higher power level holding heat constant?  (I'm not even sure whether that would be PL1, PL2, or both?)

Can we assume that thermal load is highly correlated to power consumption?  I mean, obviously yes, but HOW tightly bound is that correlation…?  Let me collate some data and see if there are any inferences to be drawn...

*System power levels + chip temp:*
i7k (stock, 190w)……...56w idle….87w single…..221w multi…..234w stress…..64C

i9k (stock, 241w)……...56w idle…..91w single…..297w multi…..350w stress…..92C
i9k (throttled, 190w)………...n/a…………...n/a…..241w multi…..278w stress…..?
i9k (throttled, 125w)…..55w idle…………...n/a…..194w multi…..204w stress…..57C
i9k (throttled, 100w)………...n/a………….. n/a…..172w multi…..177w stress…..?
i9k (throttled, 75w)……...…...n/a…………..n/a…..146w multi…..147w stress…..?
i9k (throttled, 65w)…….54w idle…………..n/a…………….n/a…..138w stress…..38C
i9k (throttled, 50w)…………..n/a…………...n/a…..120w multi…..138w stress…..?

Well with only three data points we can clearly determine that the power level to thermal load curve for i9k is not linear.  Doubling from 65w -> 125w yields a 20C rise.  Doubling again from 125w -> 241w yields a 35C rise.

We know from the full i9k review that the i7k scores _64C_ under load.  (Again, presumably PL1=PL2=190w.)  We don't know what temp the i9k gets at that power level, but we know from this club386 review that at 125w (I'm assuming PL1=PL2=125w?) the i9k is at 57C under load.

So I'm left with a few questions:

The throttled 190w i9k _system_ is consuming _more power_ than the stock 190w i7k _system_, even when the chip is set at the same 190w power level.  That's interesting, and honestly, unexpected?  Doesn't that undercut the whole idea of power limiting?

Here's the nut — we don't know what the _temperatures_ are for the i9k at 190w or 100w.  (Nor for the i7k.)  I mean, 190w will be higher than 57C and closer to 92C than 57C.  Presumably, higher than the 64C the i7k gets?  And I assume the 75w and 100w temps will slot in between the 65w at 38C and the 125w at 57C?

I'm left with the gut feeling that while an i9k might be as fast or faster than an i7k at a constant power level, it will also (inexplicably?!) consume more system power and be hotter.  I would like to hold the thermal limit constant, and then see what kind of performance the chips would give.  If my inferences are vaguely right, then the i9k would be (slightly?) more throttled than the i7k, and that might erode the performance advantage we see at constant power levels?

And to bring it back around to the little HP SFF, the i7k stock is set to PL1=90 and PL2=190.  The stock i9k is set to 90, 241.  If I understand what PL1 does, both of those chips would be throttled down significantly under load to 90w.  Which would generate-steady state temps well under 60C (I think?).  But the i7k would be able to go *longer* at the PL2 because it is overall a cooler chip than i9k at constant power…?

Might that explain what we see in the LTT video re. i7k outperforming the i9k?


Clear as mud, am I right?  I have to admit I'm frustrated by this choice, even though I know the performances differences are almost certainly less than 10% either way, either single or multi, theoretically holding heat/noise constant.

So do I stick with the i9k, throttle it down to (whatever TBD) for low noise, and get the benefit of better single/low thread work but *maybe* take a hit on higher load multi-thread usage?  Or switch to the i7k, slower at single core but cooler, and therefore *maybe* a touch better performing multi-core at the low noise ceiling???


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 13, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> First, does PL1 have _anything_ to do with these performance results? Is that number meaningful anymore? From the introduction:
> 
> {quote}
> 
> So in all these tests, _*unless specified otherwise*_, are we to assume that PL1=PL2=241w for i9k, PL1=PL2=190 for i7k, and PL1=PL2=150 for i5k? So in the results for this article, the PL1=PL2=125 gets 86% performance, and the i7k gets 90% — _*but at PL1=PL2=190w*_ — right?



PL1 will affect results when it's used. Unfortunately there has been a lot of confusion in this regard, and the Intel marketing department has been pushing that PL1=PL2=241W is/should be the default for the i9-12900K. But some motherboards may use by default specification values with a 125W PL1 and 56s Tau, while others will use basically no limits. In some cases, reviewers deliberately set power limits to the Intel specification/recommendation, in others they will try to follow marketing suggestions of PL1=PL2.


As for power testing, unfortunately, there are problems with the TechPowerUp results which were recognized earlier in this thread also by other users, but have never been addressed. This is better understood with a diagram, see below.







The i9 from the TPU review had scores decreasing linearly with power. Furthermore, efficiency (score/watt) barely increased with decreasing power limit.
The Club386 results on the other hand, although they provide only a few data points in total, roughly follow the expected power-performance curve.




kraiggers said:


> And, how does the performance of the chips change when PL1 is different than PL2? Say, when PL1=90w (like in the oem HP)? Maybe that doesn't matter since all three are set at the same PL1=90?



Difficult to predict performance when PL2 and PL1 are both used and CPU power can be temperature-limited. The CPU will run for a while at PL2 (or the highest it can up to PL2, depending on operating conditions), then continue processing at PL1. Most online reviews try instead to run the CPU at a constant power level.



kraiggers said:


> Second — and I guess related to what I wrote above — what are there thermal differences between the three chips (i5k, i7k, i9k) when run *at the same power levels*? Or, another way, can the i7k run at a higher power level holding heat constant? (I'm not even sure whether that would be PL1, PL2, or both?)



Assuming the same cooling efficiency and architecture, the chip with the larger amount of cores for the same amount of power should run at lower temperatures, since heat density will be lower (distributed over a larger surface area).



kraiggers said:


> The throttled 190w i9k _system_ is consuming _more power_ than the stock 190w i7k _system_, even when the chip is set at the same 190w power level. That's interesting, and honestly, unexpected? Doesn't that undercut the whole idea of power limiting?



The stock i7-12700K with default PL2=190W doesn't actually reach 190W (package power) during rendering benchmarks, but more like 165-175W depending on voltage settings and silicon quality. This is probably why the i9-12900K limited to 190W has a higher system consumption.

Also, most stock i9-12900K CPUs probably won't actually reach 241W during a Cinebench R23 run either, but stop at a somewhat lower level.



kraiggers said:


> I'm left with the gut feeling that while an i9k might be as fast or faster than an i7k at a constant power level, it will also (inexplicably?!) consume more system power and be hotter. I would like to hold the thermal limit constant, and then see what kind of performance the chips would give. If my inferences are vaguely right, then the i9k would be (slightly?) more throttled than the i7k, and that might erode the performance advantage we see at constant power levels?



I don't see good reasons why a somewhat larger CPU (just 4 more E-cores) of the same architecture should be hotter at the same power draw, if all other variables (cooler, motherboard) are kept the same.

From my own testing, throttling (of any kind) apparently has a very slight effect on CPU efficiency in the order 1% or so compared to the unthrottled CPU running at the same power level, it's basically within error margins. 

The only way throttling can seriously affect CPU efficiency and performance is if temperatures cannot be decreased anymore by lowering voltages and frequencies. At that point clock modulation is introduced and the CPU runs at a 25% duty cycle. However, I haven't managed to see that happening on my own system, not even after disabling the CPU fan and letting it run a rendering test continuously while getting severely temperature-throttled. I guess it will require frequency to first drop to the minimum level.



kraiggers said:


> And to bring it back around to the little HP SFF, the i7k stock is set to PL1=90 and PL2=190. The stock i9k is set to 90, 241. If I understand what PL1 does, both of those chips would be throttled down significantly under load to 90w. Which would generate-steady state temps well under 60C (I think?). But the i7k would be able to go *longer* at the PL2 because it is overall a cooler chip than i9k at constant power…?



The i7k isn't and shouldn't be an inherently cooler chip at the same power.



kraiggers said:


> Might that explain what we see in the LTT video re. i7k outperforming the i9k?



I doubt it.


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## kraiggers (Nov 13, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> Assuming the same cooling efficiency and architecture, the chip with the larger amount of cores for the same amount of power should run at lower temperatures, since heat density will be lower (distributed over a larger surface area).





Solid State Brain said:


> I don't see good reasons why a somewhat larger CPU (just 4 more E-cores) of the same architecture should be hotter at the same power draw, if all other variables (cooler, motherboard) are kept the same.





Solid State Brain said:


> The i7k isn't and shouldn't be an inherently cooler chip at the same power.



First, thanks for your time and consideration!  I really appreciate your thoughts on this topic.

My _limited_ understanding is that 'binning' slots processors into performance buckets. In other words, a chip that can perform at higher frequencies and power (and also hotter) reliably is binned to a higher bucket than lesser chips. That suggests to me that the corollary would also be true — chips that can run 'higher' would also run cooler or more efficiently at lower power / frequency levels? I don't know if this is correct, but it certainly 'feels' consistent with your third statement above.

Anyway, notwithstanding the above, the only data points I have between the i9k and i7k strongly suggest the i9k would be hotter at the same 190w power level. From my sad little table:



> *System power levels + chip temp:*
> i7k (stock, 190w)……...56w idle….87w single…..221w multi…..234w stress…..64C
> 
> i9k (stock, 241w)……...56w idle…..91w single…..297w multi…..350w stress…..92C
> ...



Are you saying this data is sufficiently 'rough' as to be unreliable or non-indicative?


And back to my fundamental question:


> So do I stick with the i9k, throttle it down to (whatever TBD) for low noise, and get the benefit of better single/low thread work but *maybe* take a hit on higher load multi-thread usage? Or switch to the i7k, slower at single core but cooler, and therefore *maybe* a touch better performing multi-core at the low noise ceiling???



It sounds like you would say my premise is flawed.  You're saying, pardon my paraphrasing, that the i9k, throttled down to (whatever TBD) for low noise, *would be faster* single/low thread work _*and still should be as fast or faster*_ at higher load multi-thread usage.  Whereas the i7k would be *slower* at single core, and _*no better or slightly worse performing *_multi-core, * at BOTH the same low power AND at a low(er) thermal & noise ceiling*?

And therefore sticking with the i9k is the correct choice *even when power limited* PL1=90w PL2=TBD1 _*specifically to reduce heat and noise*_, compared to the i7k (which would also be power limited to PL1=90 PL2=TBD2, where TBD1 may or may not match TBD2 — but they should match, or even TBD1 might be higher than TBD2 because i9k _*should*_ run cooler at constant power, data point above notwithstanding)?


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 13, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> My _limited_ understanding is that 'binning' slots processors into performance buckets. In other words, a chip that can perform at higher frequencies and power (and also hotter) reliably is binned to a higher bucket than lesser chips. That suggests to me that the corollary would also be true — chips that can run 'higher' would also run cooler or more efficiently at lower power / frequency levels? I don't know if this is correct, but it certainly 'feels' consistent with your third statement above.
> 
> Anyway, notwithstanding the above, the only data points I have between the i9k and i7k strongly suggest the i9k would be hotter at the same 190w power level. From my sad little table:
> 
> Are you saying this data is sufficiently 'rough' as to be unreliable or non-indicative?



Typical i9-12900K chips need voltages in the 1.25-1.35V range for 5.2 GHz, while typical i7-12700K need about the same voltages for 5.0 GHz. So, for the same frequencies and number of active cores the i9 will run at lower voltages and thus cooler.

Note that for 'need' I mean as reported by the internally programmed voltage-frequency curve in the CPU (which depends on silicon quality). Motherboards or end-users may apply more or less voltage than that. Some motherboards (Notably ASUS ROG ones) directly show these CPU-fused voltages in BIOS, but there are methods for retrieving them on those which don't.





kraiggers said:


> It sounds like you would say my premise is flawed. You're saying, pardon my paraphrasing, that the i9k, throttled down to (whatever TBD) for low noise, *would be faster* single/low thread work _*and still should be as fast or faster*_ at higher load multi-thread usage. Whereas the i7k would be *slower* at single core, and _*no better or slightly worse performing *_multi-core, * at BOTH the same low power AND at a low(er) thermal & noise ceiling*?



At the same power the i9 should be faster in single/low threads, and it should be also faster in MT usage than the i7.

Additionally, given the same thread usage and no power throttling, the i9 should run at the same temperatures or somewhat cooler (due to generally better silicon quality). In all-core MT loads at the same power the i9 should run cooler (due to lower power density across cores).

The above should be true unless:

Your specific i9 has IHS planarity issues ("Contact Frames" have been devised to correct this);
Your BIOS has issues with the i9;
The i7 would have had good silicon quality, while the i9 has bad silicon quality.



kraiggers said:


> And therefore sticking with the i9k is the correct choice *even when power limited* PL1=90w PL2=TBD1 _*specifically to reduce heat and noise*_, compared to the i7k (which would also be power limited to PL1=90 PL2=TBD2, where TBD1 may or may not match TBD2 — but they should match, or even TBD1 might be higher than TBD2 because i9k _*should*_ run cooler at constant power, data point above notwithstanding)?



If you are so concerned that the i9 will possibly have higher temperatures and be noisier that you need to ask the same question repeatedly in many different ways, please get the i7 so you can achieve peace of mind.

I know I would personally get the i9 and power-limit it to reasonable levels, unless money was the issue.


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## Mussels (Nov 16, 2022)

If the same wattage is spread over more cores, core temperatures will be lower assuming the cooling can keep up with the total wattage
This is why there are no simple answers because it's multiple variables together

Ryzen has some easy examples of this, where 140W on a 5800x (8 cores, 1 CCX) runs hot while the 2 and 3 CCX variants (5900x and 5950x) run a lot colder

The key is that as the power is spread over more cores the core temps go down due to the greater surface area, but each core also runs at lower clock speeds which both increases their efficiency and reduces their performance (increasing the temperature benefits more)

Low threaded content boosts the CPU's up high, which can result in those cores still spiking up rather high which is why we have these days of single threaded loads being hotter than multi-threaded


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## kraiggers (Nov 26, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> If you are so concerned that the i9 will possibly have higher temperatures and be noisier that you need to ask the same question repeatedly in many different ways, please get the i7 so you can achieve peace of mind.
> 
> I know I would personally get the i9 and power-limit it to reasonable levels, unless money was the issue.



So, just to circle back on this…

I got the i9k workstation. It was in fact pretty dang loud under any load. There is apparently a **very** steep ramp from no-fan to jet-f’ing-engine.

I was able to utilize XTU, to set custom PL1 and PL2 and tau.  But honestly, these didn’t make nearly as much difference as I had hoped. The fan still spun up and got loud; the adjustments merely allowed me to shorten the duration of the high fan noise.  And even for that they had to be *really* aggressive. Like, 90, 90, 5 sec. Or turning off boost altogether. 

So, I returned the i9k config, and I’m awaiting the i7k config I ordered. I don’t think I’ll notice any big difference, and it was $130 cheaper.  (The money wasn’t really the point, but I’ll happily save it.)

A fan control utility would perhaps be a better solution for noise control?


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 26, 2022)

If not even PL1=PL2=90W solved issues with fan speeds, then it's a specific BIOS/firmware-related problem with fan tuning with that system, possibly occurring only when an i9-12900K is installed. This goes beyond ordinary CPU power-related temperature problems that could be solved with PL/Tau tuning.

Fan speed "overshoot" (speeds increasing more than necessary under load, then quickly decreasing again under stabilized conditions) shouldn't be occurring, especially if power is limited to the TDP, i.e. what the system is supposed to be able to sustain indefinitely.

Software fan control could be a solution, but software fan control might be locked on your system. Also I don't know of many general applications that can be used for this.
Perhaps this one: https://getfancontrol.com/


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## kraiggers (Nov 26, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> If not even PL1=PL2=90W solved issues with fan speeds, then it's a specific BIOS/firmware-related problem with fan tuning with that system, possibly occurring only when an i9-12900K is installed. This goes beyond ordinary CPU power-related temperature problems that could be solved with PL/Tau tuning.
> 
> Fan speed "overshoot" (speeds increasing more than necessary under load, then quickly decreasing again under stabilized conditions) shouldn't be occurring, especially if power is limited to the TDP, i.e. what the system is supposed to be able to sustain indefinitely.



Yeah, I wonder if this enclosure is just a particularly bad fit for the i9? Or maybe the bios is poorly tuned for it? Or maybe the i7 will be just as loud, and switching to the lower processor was dumb.  [Shrug]  Frustratingly difficult to say. 

I’m probably much more noise averse — in my home office — than most people would be in an open office work-type setting. 

That fan control looks pretty dang compelling. Worth a try:


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## Solid State Brain (Nov 27, 2022)

kraiggers said:


> Yeah, I wonder if this enclosure is just a particularly bad fit for the i9? Or maybe the bios is poorly tuned for it? Or maybe the i7 will be just as loud, and switching to the lower processor was dumb. [Shrug] Frustratingly difficult to say.


I don't see any valid reason for the i7 (also limited to PL1=PL2=90W) to intrinsically behave better, except if a different fan behavior was programmed in the BIOS/firmware for this processor. The CPUs are physically the same; the i7 just has a disabled E-core cluster and slightly lower frequencies (but generally the same voltages).


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## kraiggers (Nov 27, 2022)

Solid State Brain said:


> I don't see any valid reason for the i7 (also limited to PL1=PL2=90W) to intrinsically behave better, except if a different fan behavior was programmed in the BIOS/firmware for this processor. The CPUs are physically the same; the i7 just has a disabled E-core cluster and slightly lower frequencies (but generally the same voltages).


That makes logical sense to me. 

My thought is, if they’re both going to be louder than I’d like, and I’m going to (aggressively?) throttle them both one way or another, I might as well save the money?

I hope fan control can help me achieve my desired quiet outcome...


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