i'm really excited about this video guys if you believe what Intel tells you
you'd think that this core i9
9900k 8-core processor is a 95-watt CPU
while if you believe what AMD tells you you'd believe that this ryzen 7 3800x
also eight core processor is a 105 watt CPU
so then clearly if AMD's number is
higher and Intel's number is lower
that Ryzen CPU it's gonna run hotter and kick more heat out into your room
right actually not necessarily so as it turns
out there is no industry standard way
that we can all agree on of reporting the power consumption or the TDP of a
computer processor so those numbers that i was talking about
before well it turns out it's up to third parties in the media to
investigate who is representing their product realistically and who is
painting a rosier picture than reality
well get on with it then so on our table here
we've got two benches one for team blue one for team red with our eight core
cpus installed to keep everything equal we're running our memory at the same
speed between them and they're each running a fresh install right yes fresh
os install on a pci express gen 3 drive
remember guys Intel doesn't have a consumer PCIe gen 4 chipset yet now
here's the tricky part measuring the total thermal energy
output of a CPU is not as simple as just
strapping the same cooler onto them running prime 95 and then recording the
temperature because of differences in die size ihs
solder quality software reporting accuracy etc it's actually possible for
a processor to be outputting more heat
while registering a lower temperature
or vice versa so what Anthony's been working on
is a way to instead capture as much of the heat from our
processors as possible into a known
thermal mass then measure the Ryzen temperature of
our thermal mass rather than the reported temperature of
our CPU now before we can do this we have to prepare a couple of things
normally you'd never insulate the back of your motherboard and it's power delivery components that's a great
recipe for premature failure but we want as much of the heat going into our
thermal mass to be from the CPU as possible so
sorry motherboard times two
we also need to insulate our mint julep cup here that way we can plot the change
in the water's temperature over time without worrying so much about the heat
that we are losing to the surrounding environment through the metal walls of
our cup not all containers have insulated walls like the LTT water
bottle which keeps your drink cold on a hot day lttstore.com
now let's take a look at how we're mounting our thermal capture device to the CPU honestly even compared to zip
ties this is going to be pretty sketchy but we need to make sure that we could see
the coolant inside while maintaining the same mounting pressure on both systems
and a weighted piece of glass ticked both of those boxes
now you guys might be wondering if all we need is a thermal mass
why use water why not just put a big hunk of metal
with an embedded thermal probe on top of the CPU and the answer of course is that
that's not nearly as much fun to look at enter thermochromic ink this stuff comes
from lcr hall crest and it's called chromogen and what it does is once the
water reaches 80 degrees celsius the ink will begin to change color from white to
black basically whoever hits that point first is outputting the most heat since
this is permanent we'll have to be sure to add the same amount for each run uh
we didn't bring a syringe so do you want to just pour a cap full uh yeah sure i
can try okay sure
and it goes whoa
give a little mix with our k-type probe that's what those are for right yeah and
we'll go ahead and don't get cut by the edges of this glass please
so we've got just about 300 milliliters of water in
there and then our ink probably puts us somewhere in the neighborhood of about
325s about a tablespoon of ink
so ah let's go ahead and turn on the
machine that sounds like an idea
not sure if it's a good idea all right let's fire up our thermal
probe here 10 degrees so you guys might have
noticed that our coolant is pretty chilly that's because we put it in the
fridge before we started to make sure we had a little bit of time to boot up the
system before we needed to start the test so the plan is to hit go on blender here
at exactly 22 degrees celsius so i'm gonna go ahead and hit it with uh with a
load here to try and heat up our water a bit okay
so we ran into a slight problem the instant we fire up any kind of CPU
intensive load our processor temperatures go to
thermal throttling territory boom which means that we are not getting the full
power out of the chip because it's holding itself back we unfortunately
selected a stainless steel vessel for
our water and dye solution
but no worries the good folks at madrina's have us covered they shipped us these weird
camping cups and alex found one so we are going to uh convert this
to be our cooler now
do you think it's steel do we have a magnet that won't tell us if it's stainless steel wish us luck
so good news and bad news alex good news is i removed the bottom of the cup the
bad news is there is a whole lot of space in between the one
bottom and the other more different bottom cup number two
there we go okay so
after a bit of milling alex has gotten us this little disc here and as you can
see it's got a little bit of a cut out here on the inside and what we can do is
just slot our cup right into that mix
this up put it around the edge and it should be
watertight within about 20 minutes i never said i was good at arts and
crafts i am measuring out
wait why is this milky
oh wait what it was in the cap
so we're back 300 mils of water oh wow we kind of
need more now so we're back
400 milliliters of water later we have a slightly larger vessel this time let's
use this cap this time let's put on some fresh thermal compound i see you just
cleaned it off okay it's a little on the heavy side but
should be okay and
schwippity schwampty does it fit
please tell me it doesn't interfere with anything well there's only one way to
find out let's fire this mess up are we missing anything
um aside from like the probe the glass
yeah aside from that no i just want to know if it thermal throttles
well we're not going to have the mounting pressure ah that's fine i can just push on it
show me the blender
that looks like good news CPU temperature is actually reasonable
35 is way too high yep thermal throttling i don't think
it's making proper contact uh that's fine i can just push on it
all right i sanded off the side let's see if it's a
contact error or if we just have a different problem
so it looks like it actually is working
but we just need a little bit of coolant flow within the container
and that dramatically affects our CPU temps
and then once it's moving the heat from the CPU causes more
convection yeah we are turboing to 4.0
4.1 gigahertz across all cores right now so we may be in business although
i have a new problem um that i identified if we actually wait until the
coolant reaches 80 degrees no matter which CPU it is it will have
long thermal throttle before then
right right so
i was trying to avoid this but we are just going to do this
the simple way with a very short loop we've got a reservoir a pump and a CPU
block no radiator no fans because remember we want our water to absorb the
heat and we want to track the changes in temperature over time
now we do introduce the variable of our pump actually giving off some heat into
the loop but given how significant our CPU is as a heat source
i don't expect it to cause too many problems with that said i predicted lots
of things today that weren't going to cause too many problems and
yet here we are
so are we going to run the reservoir without the cap on yes
why don't we start with 500 mils
that should be a pretty good amount for this loop actually that might be too
much 400 mils here we go
ah crap is it leaking
no it's just not a lot of water so that was what 250
mils it's a cup yes
something went right so let's do a quick cinebench r20 run
our coolant temperature is 16.5 degrees
which means we've still got time we are turboing over 4 gigahertz we're
at about 4.2 and our hottest core is about 51 degrees right now so this is
exactly the behavior that we are looking for so
we've decided we're gonna formally start our graphs
once the CPU hits 100 load and it begins actually
completing the render so that put us at it somewhere in the neighborhood of
around 28 degrees so now all we got to do is strap in and
see how long this takes before it gets hot
so it's been about uh five minutes of actual render now and
we're up to about 43 degrees we need uh
we need another 35 degrees and then theoretically this will
turn black it'll be pretty sick
unfortunately we only have about another 25 degrees to go before we thermal
throttle so it might go a little slower
for that last 10 degrees yeah
what's it currently sitting at 75-ish what's the clock
4.2 4.1 4.2
that's a little high i think it's
multi-core enhancement enabled oh
well we were planning to run it twice anyway weren't we yeah
oh wait well hold on a second we were chit-chatting there and well
this color change die sucks because it starts changing colors at like
60 degrees well unless it got hotter in the blog so why don't we just ride this
out to 100 degrees when the CPU starts really thermal throttling and then we'll
just plot it yeah so we are on the brink of thermal
throttling now our coolant is at 68 degrees
uh core number two is at 99 degrees we're actually still running at 3.8 to 3.9
gigahertz so uh
pad respect for that i guess but we're gonna have to shut this experiment down
pretty quickly of course though we would be remiss if we didn't wait until
uh we got another 0.3 degrees on here and then we can let it
end so we made yet another observation
this time it was that the settings that our CPU was running at
weren't really stock and they weren't really multi-core
enhancement either what the why is this a greater volume of water this time
i could have sworn it was oh wait did i say 350 mils last time i might have
missed a hundred mils there let me put in exactly 100 mils and see if that
makes up the difference nope that weren't it
absorb absorb my pretty
this is not going to be in the video okay so a couple rough things happened
yesterday did this system just hard reset what
all right so we learned a lot yesterday we got this cool graph of our water
temperature over time and all that good stuff but even just on Intel alone
that's not the complete story because yesterday we were running the default
behavior so Intel's stock with multi-core enhancement disabled but a
multi-core enhancement allows your CPU to boost for a longer period of time so
for this run here we have enabled multi-core enhancement and we're going
to go ahead and hit it again once we hit 22 degrees
round number two here we go we're turboing to 4.7 4.8 ish
seems good we're not expecting a difference here though we're just
expecting it to stay at its maximum turbo frequencies for
longer come on baby five start blending me
six seven eight nine there it goes 27.5 okay good enough
all right let's see how she heats up
now this is weird we're only about a minute into our render and our slowest
cores are already sitting at 4.1
gigahertz that's not very enhancing is it no
that's like slightly behanced still i don't remember
seeing 4.1 at this stage of the game last time around no 4.1 didn't happen
until like i want to say 10 minutes in
okay so as you can see our liquid turned dark and that means that this test is
done uh it hit 69 degrees like our last one
at about 16 16 and a half minutes for now it
looks like multi-core enhancement did nothing more than increase the thermals
weird now i just need to take my ice water
fill it up and fire it up we are using xmp i figure
that with AMD cpus anyway
the performance of the CPU and therefore how hot it gets it's going to be broadly
determined by the speed of the RAM so if we use 2133 memory or something
like that it might not be a fair test it's actually a little funny it's not
warming up as fast as the Intel CPU did
so 21.5 i'm going to stop prime95 switch
back over to blender and then when it hits 22 i'm gonna start
it off 4.1 gigahertz and only
42 degrees on our coolant that seems
pretty similar actually
similar now that i look at it yeah but it seems to be tracking a little bit
lower a little lower so we're going to need the full length
of our run in order to find out
whether or not AMD is actually
outputting less heat here okay so we're almost
11 minutes into our test at this point our water is currently at about 56
degrees celsius now if we check and see
where we were at 11 minutes on our 9700k
it was actually 58 so we're still a couple degrees colder
it's starting to look like the uh the processors are are separating
we're at 63.5 degrees and
15 minutes in Intel was at 66 degrees
so it looks like even given AMD's
higher rated TDP their CPU is actually outputting less
heat one thing that we probably won't graph
just because that wasn't really the point of the video but that we thought was interesting at the end of the test
Intel had rendered around 300 tiles and change whereas even now
almost complete on the AMD side of things we've done nearly 1900 so
that's uh well that's that's rough that's rough
what's our current time at our current time is at 20 minutes and 23 seconds
okay we're at 67.2 degrees so yes our AMD processor did output less
heat so then why is it that our results seem to differ from what both AMD and
Intel state on the packaging the answer is that it comes down to how
the two companies measure TDP Intel measures TDP based on
recommendations for cooling solutions assuming the processor will run at its
base frequency in other words their number is intended as a guideline that
system integrators can use to avoid thermal throttling not necessarily to
allow the CPU to turbo up to its maximum all the time by contrast AMD measures
their TDP as the maximum power a processor can draw for a thermally
significant period while running a typical load and that might seem like
the same thing but thanks to precision boost it's not AMD's ryzen cpus will
attempt to run at the fastest possible speed at all times similar to a modern
GPU and this is where AMD measures their
TDP so if Intel were to measure their TDP this way they would actually have to
measure it with their turbo boost limiters disabled which would make it
measurably higher now the thing is
i don't think either of us is in a position to propose like an
industry-wide uh way of
standardly measuring TDP clearly we're
not in that position it'd be nice though what we do know is that having everyone
go their own way on this is harmful to consumers who use this spec as a way to
choose between one product and another so in the long term hopefully the major
players in the industry can come together and standardize on a way of
measuring but in the meantime the best advice we can give you is to just ignore
it unless you're comparing apples to apples so like within Intel's own
product lines and even hopefully the same product families and rely on
independent reviews like our recent video card buyer's guide which actually
Anthony hosted they should go check that out right yeah sure heck yeah so thanks
for watching guys hope you enjoyed it see ya