Friday, April 28th 2023
AMD Ryzen 7000X3D Power Consumption Spiking Beyond 100 W in Idle Mode
According to investigations undertaken by Igor's Lab and Hardware Busters this week it seems that AMD's problematic lineup of Ryzen 7000 & Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs are consuming unexpected levels of power in short bursts when running in idle mode. In conducting more in-depth tests over the past few days, Igor Wallossek and (outgoing TPU PSU expert) Aristeidis Bitziopoulos have both found that that the aforementioned AMD processors are producing (to the testers' slight concern) power spikes in situations involving minimal computing activity. It is not currently known whether the sharp climbs in power consumption are in any way related to the burnout issues experienced by unlucky overclockers this week.
Aris/crmaris (at Hardware Busters) says that he has tested many of the affected processors in the past, but was not privy to any major problems relating to burnout or power consumption spikes. By running new tests this week, using his own Powenetics v2 board, Aris has found out that: "There are some interesting facts here, which I didn't pay much attention to during the reviews because I only look at the average values and not the peak ones in idle. In the 7950X3D, there is a high spike during idle at 130 W, which is unjustified because the peak CPU load is only 3.53%. Even with the Curve Optimized enabled and a -15 setting, the idle power spike is close to 125 W, so something is happening there. On the 7800X3D, the spike during idle stays low, but this is not the case for the 7900X, which has an idle power spike at 109 W, while the peak CPU load at idle was at 5.12%, so these 109 W are not justified, either."
Video coverage of the matter has been provided by Hardware Busters in their "AMD Ryzen 7000 Series burn issues? Our Findings!" upload to YouTube:
Igor does not get dramatic about the latest findings, and suggests that AMD should not be judged too harshly: "Aris (crmaris) and I are of the opinion that these load peaks (which I could reproduce 1:1 in the meantime, by the way), primarily have nothing to do with the described CPU dying - we put a lot of emphasis on that to avoid a false panic. But on the other hand, such transients are nothing you need for a really stable system. Aris has also already spoken to some of his industry contacts, who have told him that the overall RMA rates of the 7000 series are actually lower than those of the 5000 series. This should avoid panic and also not discourage anyone from buying a new AMD CPU."
Sources:
Hardware Busters, Igor's Lab DE
Aris/crmaris (at Hardware Busters) says that he has tested many of the affected processors in the past, but was not privy to any major problems relating to burnout or power consumption spikes. By running new tests this week, using his own Powenetics v2 board, Aris has found out that: "There are some interesting facts here, which I didn't pay much attention to during the reviews because I only look at the average values and not the peak ones in idle. In the 7950X3D, there is a high spike during idle at 130 W, which is unjustified because the peak CPU load is only 3.53%. Even with the Curve Optimized enabled and a -15 setting, the idle power spike is close to 125 W, so something is happening there. On the 7800X3D, the spike during idle stays low, but this is not the case for the 7900X, which has an idle power spike at 109 W, while the peak CPU load at idle was at 5.12%, so these 109 W are not justified, either."
Igor does not get dramatic about the latest findings, and suggests that AMD should not be judged too harshly: "Aris (crmaris) and I are of the opinion that these load peaks (which I could reproduce 1:1 in the meantime, by the way), primarily have nothing to do with the described CPU dying - we put a lot of emphasis on that to avoid a false panic. But on the other hand, such transients are nothing you need for a really stable system. Aris has also already spoken to some of his industry contacts, who have told him that the overall RMA rates of the 7000 series are actually lower than those of the 5000 series. This should avoid panic and also not discourage anyone from buying a new AMD CPU."
58 Comments on AMD Ryzen 7000X3D Power Consumption Spiking Beyond 100 W in Idle Mode
The title of this article contradicts the content and is downright misleading. The CPUs aren't consuming a ton on idle, only that Arris found that his one sample happened to have a few spikes that were a bit high.The source of this article was not intended to show high idle power consumption, it was intended as an investigative video as to the source of AMD CPU burnouts. The author is taking a small comment Arris made and trying to make it seem like it's something much bigger. I don't know how we go from a few small spikes on a single CPU to All 7000 series CPUs are always consuming a high amount at idle.
Igor/Aris:
7950X3D Idle AVG - 50.531 W
7950X3D Idle AVG, CO -15 - 45.952 W
W1zzard (from review):
7950X3D 1T - 37W
7950X3D 1T PBO+UV - 39W
Why are the idle readings higher than when loaded by an MP3 encoder?
It's even more out of whack for the 7900x. Aris reports idle is 63.8W, W1zzard reports 1T is 36-42W (depending on the review). Unfortunately W1zzard no longer records idle power for his reviews so I can't compare more directly.
OT: I would be pissed if I upgraded to a 7900, nominally 65W TDP, to later learn that it idled at 47W.
Bios related
Or
Windows power settings related
Or
Windows scheduler
Or
Other
Or
Combinations
Or
Unknown??
Here is a snapshot of my 7800X3D power breakdown:
The CPU cores are only taking 7.153 watts here, the rest is taken by overhead. Total power consumption is about 32 watts at the time I took the screenshot. Wizard's review shows 16w single threaded.
This is literally how the entire product line works. It is how they were designed. It is normal.
What is not normal is that they tried beating Intel at the maximum watts used metric too, so the chips overclock themselves to 5+GHz so they can get +1 fps out of CS:GO. And this requires a stupid amount of power, burning down the chips and/or requiring 360 rads to keep them cool.
Just turn PBO off, problem solved, and the chip won't go higher than 70C even with just a hyper 212.And this too. AMD already warned about that a long time ago. The ryzen chips change clocks faster than applications can measure them, and polling the chip already gives it some work, increasing the clocks.
Just having Ryzen Master open made both my 3600 and 5600G idle at +10W higher, despite there being 0 actual workload. That could explain the difference in watts between Igor and W1zzard. But that difference could also be a ton of other things like board type, BIOS/AGESA version, whatever.
That said, the average idle readings alone are still basically nothing surprising, and if they truly want to measure average idle free of disruptions, they should have tested in safemode.
VRM efficiency is also low at idle, so seeing higher readings on EPS than SVI3 software also seems par for the course; the gap should narrow under load.What aris and igor observed is not your typical Ryzen idle spikes, Aris uses a physical power measurement board to grab EPS readings from the cable.
130W peaks aren't idle or Windows related process spikes anymore, lol. Windows services and processes that are significant enough to disrupt idle also apply loads that pretty much always are sustained for a few seconds and long enough for even software to record the load and wattage increase.
This is the CPU load with 2 separate browsers & 20+ tabs combined.
This when I started hwinfo.
This when I fired up the sensors on hwinfo with 200ms polling.
The higher CPU usage at the end is when I changed the polling interval to 20ms about a minute or two after launching hwinfo.
So don't assume you know something when we don't have the full data on this. It could well be a defective chip, windows or any other "rogue" process!
Does the same thing happen on Linux (near-idle power spikes)?
The "spikes" you see in your monitoring are sustained far longer.You do realize that 200ms is laughably slow compared to how they're testing, right? lol
Kinda the whole point of monitoring with hardware from EPS, like I said, picks up a lot more data than HWInfo ever could.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)
You still haven't explained how without knowing what's running in the background we can come to any conclusion? Like a I said 3.53% load on a 16c/32t CPU isn't negligible, unless they were talking about load just on the one core?
Maybe..