[SOLVED] Will a 460% increase in TDP kill my cpu ?

[tek3195]

I have an i7-9700 that was throttling severely. I found that if I increase TDP to 300W it stops all throttling. It does not draw near that, I believe 154W was highest I seen from it. If I use 300W setting it will run all 8 cores dead on 4500MHz which is max turbo for 8 cores. A thirty minute stress test in XTU yields 61*C at max turbo with 100% cpu utilization and no throttling of any kind. Is 300W TDP on a 65W processor safe as long as temps are low ?

 

[uWebb429]

As you already discovered, the only way to get maximum performance out of a 65W Intel desktop CPU is to increase the turbo power limits sky high. I set both of these limits to the maximum value, 4095. This ensures that they will never interfere with maximum performance. As long as your CPU is not overheating, this is not going to hurt anything.

An 8 core CPU running at 145W or 150W is a joke. Intel's 10 core CPUs can run reliably at over 300W.

If you ever see power consumption and temperatures like this, then it is time to worry a little.

 

[tek3195]

As you already discovered, the only way to get maximum performance out of a 65W Intel desktop CPU is to increase the turbo power limits sky high. I set both of these limits to the maximum value, 4095. This ensures that they will never interfere with maximum performance. As long as your CPU is not overheating, this is not going to hurt anything.

An 8 core CPU running at 145W or 150W is a joke. Intel's 10 core CPUs can run reliably at over 300W.

If you ever see power consumption and temperatures like this, then it is time to worry a little.

Thanks for confirming. The 300W I got from somewhere in Intel documentation. Of course I couldn't find it again when I wanted to double check. I think it may have been from 8th gen, I know I saw it as an upper limit. At 290W it throttles just a little bit, like 4.45 - 4.4GHz. 300 is where the magic lies for a 9700 I guess. It seemed odd that at times it would pull 105W while at 100% load and 4.5GHz and others it would be around 150W. Different type of load, or what makes for huge power diff at same clock speed and 100% utilization ?

 

[uWebb429]

Power consumption varies depending on the type of CPU instructions being executed. If you want to see some crazy power consumption, run Prime95 and select the Small FFTs test.

GIMPS - Free Prime95 software downloads - PrimeNet

GIMPS has free software available for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX. Contribute to the effort by using your computer's spare processing power.

www.mersenne.org

You can choose to run this test with or without AVX or AVX-2 instructions. Same test but you will see a big difference in power consumption depending on what instructions the CPU uses.

Intel's latest 11th Gen 11700K and 11900K support the AVX-512 instructions. These instructions allow the CPU to perform some specialized calculations 5 times faster. There are no free lunches so power consumption can double. The complaints have already started. That seems reasonable considering the increase in performance. CPU temps can jump to 100°C almost instantaneously.