Intel's Z590 Motherboard Problem: i7-11700K Power & Thermals Explained

today we're visiting a topic with the intel 11 series cpus and as we approach the review timing for the cpus which is the 30th that was early because we bought it retail as we approach that review timing you're going to see reviewers who get numbers that are different from each other sometimes it could be as much as 8 or 12 in terms of the relative positioning one cpu to the next and that's what matters here relative positioning not the absolute numbers because everyone tests a little bit differently but we wanted to just explain in advance where those differences come from it's from the motherboards and specifically it's from motherboard manufacturers deciding to cheat the intel official guidance which is not technically a spec but might as well be one because it's on the spec sheet they're cheating the intel guidance so that when you put the cpu in one board versus another if a reviewer tests them motherboard a will top the charts well motherboard b will slot in below it because they followed the actual guidance from intel so this is basically once again talking about power limits tau or turbo duration expiry and how the performance of an intel cpu will look different based on the motherboard used and the approach to testing methodology before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly thermal grizzlies hydrant and cryonite thermal paste are high performing thermal interfaces for use on cpus and gpus you can bring an old card back to peak performance by replacing it and doing preventative maintenance and thermal grizzlies hydrant is ideal for water cooling and air quote for new and old cards alike cryonot paste is one of the top performing pace for extreme overclocking with cpus and gpus and has been used in several world record scoring machines learn more at the link in the description below we've explained this basically every intel launch for several years now and we'll go into some of the details again today on pl1 pl2 tau things of that nature but we're not going to talk about it to the same depth as we did in 2020 when we covered the topic exhaustively so that will be linked below if you'd like to check out the explainer of all of intel's terminology and what it means none of that has changed it's the same terminology for the 10 series as 11. we'll link that but we're going to go over some basics here now the top level of this is that when we first started working on our review we noticed once again as we've seen many times now that in particular this gigabyte board was way outperforming where it made sense for the 11700k to perform and that's because it was ignoring the turbo boosting duration limit which is a time period for which the intel cpu if it has boost technology not all of them do uh it's the time limit for which it can boost before it has to step down the clocks to then match or obey the power limits there's pl1 and pl2 uh in the past for example with the 10 series pl 1 the limit was 125 watts on a 10 900 k and pl2 was 250 that didn't mean it always draws 250 watts under pl2 uh conditions it might draw 200 but 250 was the ceiling and 125 was pl1 then tau was about 56 seconds before stepping down the clocks to get back in line with effectively a one-to-one tdp now tdp is not a literal power consumption number even though it has watts at the end but with intel it's very close to one to one when following the guidance for pl1 pl2 and tap up until the turbo duration expiry it will draw much more power but thereafter it should be about one to one with tdp amd completely different story in fact power doesn't even appear in the formula for tdp which has a w at the end of it for amd's tdp and we have a whole video explaining amd's tdp separately amd's more so takes into account the cooler and it was actually reverse engineered to mostly meet intel cdp so that oems could build coolers to the same so-called spec anyway different story these boards will draw very different power and they'll push the cpu very differently that results in different numbers and depending on how reviewers test the cpus those numbers will materialize differently in their reviews one reviewer to the next all of it's okay it's all defensible as long as the reviewer knows what they're doing and has made a conscious decision to test it with say following strictly the intel official guidance that doesn't mean intel gives us guidance that means intel gives the motherboard manufacturers guidance and they say hey here's the recommended spec to stay within a certain thermal envelope or target and a certain power target and that's the number that's published when you see 125 watt tdp and it's the numbers that in theory should be followed when the processor is installed into a cpu socket it doesn't always work that way though because the board vendors have some freedom to deviate so we believe in following the basically the effective spec from the manufacturer when we review a product because otherwise you start having to draw squirrely rules and and make weird circular logic and reasoning as to why you will allow turbo duration limits to be ignored or power limits to be ignored on intel but not make similar changes similar accommodations for amd testing or why you do it in one generation not the other so we just find it easier to follow the guidance some reviewers don't do that that's completely fine we don't have a problem with it just be aware that it will change the hierarchical stack and both numbers are completely fine as long as you as the viewer understand how those numbers were achieved and then draw that relation back to how you're planning to use the product if you're planning to use it following the power limits so that you don't have to buy a stupid ridiculous cooler or run it extremely loud to accommodate the 11 series then you should be looking at reviews like ours that enforce those limits if you really don't care and you're just going to run it max out a box and effectively allow the motherboard to overclock itself then that's where those uh numbers ignoring tau come into play okay so enough of that if you want more details on the terminology check our video link in the description below from last year exact same just a different processor and let's get into the benchmarks we'll show you how it materializes thermally which will affect noise as well and how it materializes for power frequency gaming performance and production performance like premiere and blender power consumption is the easiest place to show differences in the motherboard settings we'll get into thermals and fps shortly but this chart shows you how power consumption in blender after five minutes so a pretty long time after the 56 second intel guidance for tao expiry ends up performing on both the boards the asus board ran the 11700k at 126 watts before vrm efficiency losses and after the wall in this test which is nearly one to one with the tdp and is following intel's guidance precisely it's exactly to what intel says these should run at the gigabyte bios with the microcode update so bios f4 ran at 170 watts in this test the gigabyte z590 master bios from january ran out 182 watts in the same exact test and the asus board pushed to 191 watts when we disabled all of the intel limitations and allowed it to run basically max that's a higher voltage increase across the cpu pushing the power higher because the frequency is being held at a higher level than it would be under guidance the end result is a 60 to 70 watt range that's actually not the worst we've ever seen the worst we saw was the 10900k which ran at 200 watts without tau expiry or 125 to 130 with it and we know that other reviewers with different motherboards for the 10 series back when it launched saw as high as 250 watts so you had potentially a 100 watt plus 120 130 watt delta with the 10 900 k between different boards depending on the tao expiry setting you can see how this heavily impacts the choice of cooler and the performance of the cpu so intel as it has been doing for years is making itself look worse by allowing the motherboard manufacturers a little bit of room to tweak the settings and it's good and bad because there's some freedom provided to the partners whereas nvidia for example is very strict with how the cards its partners make are created and enabled for things like overclocking but the bad side is that because there's a little bit of chaos in the mix based on the motherboard the bios and then further how the reviewer or the user decides to change the settings for example uh enforce all limits on the asus board or or don't and let it do the effect of overclock with mce and things like that intel starts looking worse and that's because the cooler requirement skyrockets as you let it push 200 or 250 watts into the cpu for more than a minute additionally the noise will go up as we stated the voltages can potentially be unstable depending on the boardmaker and how they set things like llc and vcore and sa and i o and all the other voltages depending on how they set those voltages you could very easily end up in a state and we've seen it where out of box cpu straight into a motherboard don't change any settings and because some form of mce is on you end up with a blue screen and that's a bad experience for the user and it could turn someone away from intel for a generation or two or three and that's bad for intel so optically this doesn't work out well for intel when the motherboard manufacturers are in complete chaos and doing whatever they want because you end up with a cpu that looks hot and people will blame the cpu and they'll blame intel because it's a meme and the cpu looks like it's high power consumption and the same thing will happen now in terms of efficiency they're kind of right the people who say it's high power consumption is not more efficient than amd let's just get that clear right now but it looks a whole lot worse when it says 200 or 250 watts for anywhere between two percent and eight percent more performance and that's not necessarily intel's fault but it will certainly be perceived that way let's move into the next set of benchmarks power consumption in cinebench mostly shows the same numbers except the tao expiry number now plots at 191 watts rather than 126 watts previously that's because we're measuring within 56 seconds so boards that follow tow expiry guidance are still going to plot high here the others move around marginally based on things like power leakage heating up or power leakage being a result of that and just the workload changing to a different application we'll next look at the most tangible difference in thermals we're using our standardized arctic liquid freezer 2 280 at 100 pump and fan speeds for all of this the liquid freezer 2 is among the best cpu coolers we've reviewed recently including both noise normalized thermals and maxed fan speeds hence our choice of using it we're not controlling board voltage at all for this so we're just letting the board do what it wants because the point of this test in is to see what the board does and if it does stupid things then we should allow for it to do stupid things that means the board is largely dictating the temperature of the cpu more so in some ways than the cpu itself because it's allowing the cpu to run at a higher power profile than maybe is recommended here's a chart in blender 2.92 rendering for approximately 17 minutes the asus board started out by spiking the 60 degrees celsius in a 21c ambient and it had clearly not yet reached steady state as it only had 56 seconds to run these settings this would ramp hard and to a much higher temperature but a sudden and sharp drop in frequency and therefore v core meant temperature also fell by about 15 degrees celsius here this is by design and it's because the turbo boosting limit has expired driving the frequency back down to a number that allows the cpu to run at about 125 watts or roughly tdp as opposed to the 60 to 70 watt higher power consumption when boosting occurs let's plot the gigabyte board next this one never expires turbo so we see a much steadier climb to steady state as a result of the mostly fixed power consumption and v core the gigabyte board ended up running about 57 degrees celsius with bios f4 which includes the microcode updates by the way the original bios ran at about the same temperature all totaled this isn't a terribly high temperature for blender which is a heavy workload and gaming would be lower or worst case about the same under these exact test conditions just with a game that's heavily cpu bound just as a reminder though this becomes more of a test again of the cpu cooler and the motherboard than the cpu itself it's not necessarily accurate to say a cpu is quote unquote hot it can be but uh what determines whether or not that statement is accurate is really whether or not the cpu is consistently hot across a majority or a large cross-section of platforms rather than just one motherboard that's maybe pushing way too much voltage in when left the auto settings we've certainly seen that in the past we saw this previously with gigabyte and the 7700k where one of the boards we had tested was massively overvolting the cpu versus what it actually needed thus resulting in a high temperature but that was the board's fault in that instance if you ran a workload with certain instructions like avx abx 512 for example you'll also see hotter temperatures this is expected the point though is that the thermal requirements of a stock 11 series cpu will change heavily contingent upon the motherboard's power limit settings if the board follows intel official guidance or if you manually force the board to follow the guidance which is possible through bios then it'll run the cpu at a lower temperature under sustained workloads and therefore require less cooling power and potentially allow for lower noise levels as a result one area problems emerge is the core to core delta your cpu is really only as good as your hottest core in scenarios where the cooler isn't quite powerful enough to cope this chart shows the average per core temperature during the previous test at steady state we're interested in this to determine the core decor deltas because a wider delta makes it harder to control the cpu boosting behavior the asus board ran the tightest together overall with a range of only about 6 degrees celsius roughly 44 to 50 with some plus or minus in there that's a good quarter core range and is what we strive for even in an extreme overclocking scenario with liquid nitrogen that would those would be excellent numbers the gigabyte board with bios f4 ran the widest deltas validating after a few test passes and remounts and plotted a 16 degree range as a result of the higher and more constant power getting pushed through the cpu 16 degrees isn't the worst we've ever seen that award goes to the 9980xe that we laughed out of necessity but it's still a wide gap that means that if we had a cooler that kept the cpu at an acceptable average of 85 degrees we'd have one core potentially throttling as it peaked the cooling requirement increases substantially because of that one core there are two common causes for this that we can illustrate one is the ihs or the integrated heat spreader thickness and in our 9980xe lapping video you can see that there were some extremely low spots in the ihs that's shown when you look at where the copper is getting revealed against the nickel plating the second is just from shoving more power into the cpu and having some cores positioned where they're more thermally insulated by the rest of the die or the ihs thickness above them frequency validation will help fully illustrate the performance affecting behaviors and then we'll move on to benchmarks to show the tangible impact here's a blender all-core workload once again the maximum single core frequency per interval plots for asus first where we'll see tao expiry kicking in and knocking it down from 4 600 megahertz to a range of 4 000 megahertz or 4100 sometimes this follows the anticipated power behavior and keep in mind that the presence of certain instructions like again avx affects the boosting behavior gigabyte to f4 bios plots a hard 4600 for its single highest core throughout the entire test asus's average frequency doesn't deviate much from its highest single core and gigabytes doesn't either this is what's creating the power consumption difference and thus the performance difference frequency with a single threaded workload doesn't need to follow turbo boosting duration limits because the power consumption itself is so low around 40 watts that pl1 and pl2 don't trigger any frequency pullbacks the scale here has been zoomed in to just 4 900 to 5 000 megahertz so it'll exaggerate the differences this is just so you can see them but know that they aren't too relevant the asus max single core clock for interval was 5 gigahertz with gigabytes f4 bios a little lower at 49.90 megahertz and the original gigabyte bios did around 49.94 megahertz time to get into games intel is obsessed with what it calls real world benchmarks so it's time to look at some of those we'll simplify these charts to make them easier to read so if you want the full comparison versus computing or former products beyond what we show here check our recent review of the 11700k the 11700k with all intel guidance applied so 125 watts ran at 287 fps average disabling turbo boosting limits on the gigabyte board resulted in 307 fps average with the microcode update and gear one and that's an uplift of seven percent that's basically overclocking at this point and should be viewed as overclocking in other words if this is considered a valid stock result then overclocking amd and its cpus should be considered a valid stock result f1 2020 at 1440p is still interesting for its previous behaviors with guidance followed as we did on the 10700k the 11700k ends up behind it and at 262 fps average the 11700k without these limits runs almost identically to the 10700k but still gets beaten by amd that doesn't look great for the 11700k in either scenario but especially not where the 10700k is leading it more meaningfully red dead redemption 2 is next and this one the 11700k with stock limits ran functionally the same as the 10.7 both around 167 to 168 fps average the 11 7 without its limits operate at a four percent higher frame rate at 175 fps average that's not enough to change anyone's experience in real life other than of course needing a more expensive cooler but it is enough to change the optics of the chart intel goes from the bottom of the chart to the top positioning as it relates to nearby amd components in rainbow six siege at 1080p the intel 1100k moved 1.7 from 451 to 459 fps average this is just a factor of if the cores are all loaded or not that's enough though to push it from behind the 5600x to ahead of it despite being functionally the same experience and unidentifiably different to a human the 10700k was behind in this game as it is in gta 5 and falls slightly more behind as a result of the 11 700k running 70 watts higher than before cyberpunk 2077 also slightly moved the 11700k and 10700k alongside the 5900x were all functionally tied at 159 fps average that changed to moving to 162 with all the boost limits lifted gaining just two percent in this title hitman 3 is a heavy cpu workload with our current setup the 11700k originally did 132 fps average in this one with the functional overclock gaining at a more notable eight percent that'll show up in reviews when they start coming out this was enough to boost the 11700k past the 5800x in a way which is meaningfully advantaged especially visually on a chart and it also went past the 10-700k this however is tested differently than the 10700k on this chart in the 5800x so we believe it to be an invalid comparison unless the same conditions are applied to all cpus in the very least in order to justify this performance in a benchmark for the 11 7 you would need to at least set the 10 700k to run in the same way time to look at production workloads and these we're looking almost exclusively at constant all-core workloads which means an extra 500 to 600 megahertz per core will add up fast in blender for example the 1100k originally did about 19 minutes for rendering one frame it reduced to 16 and a half with the towel limits ignored that's a 12 reduction in time required to render you start extrapolating that across hundreds of frames for a full animation and it becomes a huge change undoubtedly this will result in confusion when reviewers choose different methods of testing that doesn't mean that reviewers are wrong for doing it a different way but it does mean that you as a viewer will need to understand how each person tested the product if trying to compare cross review and ideally you just don't do that but it's impossible to prevent either way you need to know how people tested it and then make your decisions from there adobe premiere is up now using aggregate scoring of rendering and encoding performance and it also aggregates preview scrubbing playback and video effect application the 1100k scored 767 points under intel guidance moving to 810 points with the power limits disabled or at least the power turbo boosting duration limit there is a 5.6 benefit from allowing turbo to boost infinitely here in photoshop the 11700k moves from 1120 points to 1165 points a gain of four percent the 5800x still holds a lead over intel but the lead narrow is a little bit more in compression benchmarks with 7-zip the 11700k processed 75 000 mips or millions of instructions per second moving to 78 000 with the limits off this is more than we saw in decompression but it's still not a huge change compared to some of the other benchmarks in decompression the 1100k the 96 000 mips with limits off or 95 with a mod really no change here compiling the chromium code base required 102 minutes stock which to intel's credit is better than the 10700k but outdoing your previous generation isn't really deserving of credit dropping boost limits jumped to 95 minutes 6.7 percent reduced in time required this is exacerbated as the time required to do a task increases since there will be longer periods between boosting so that's it then although this is extra performance it's not free performance there's a cost because the cooling requirement goes up the noise goes up the stability potentially goes down depending on if the motherboard manufacturer can be trusted to do any validation you'd be surprised and the performance doesn't necessarily go up that much but it can go enough up to exchange places with some of the other neighboring cpus and that sometimes is all that a company needs in order to be perceived as better than either a competitor or than its previous generation for our testing as we've said for the last several years we enforce the power limits and we enforce the turbo duration limit unless for some reason there's a platform that doesn't allow in which case we would tell you but we choose platforms that allow or automatically enforce those limits the asus one has a toggle that's f1 to enable or you can change it in bios the gigabyte one you would have to go type in 56 in the turbo duration limit window if you see differences in numbers once reviews start rolling out keep in mind that a lot of it as it's been for the last probably six years will be because of mce or because of turbo duration limits and again as we said in the beginning as long as everyone understands viewers especially how it's being tested on that review outlets bench that's all that matters just be aware it will change the hierarchy a little bit although this time intel's behind enough that it's not really surpassing amd and most of the comparisons uh even with mce on but it is surpassing the 10-7 with a little bit more ease or equating it which is a a horrific spot to be in for intel again waste of sand but check out the review for that thanks for watching hopefully that explains a few things with pl1 pl2 and tau and why the power numbers and the thermals are going to be all over the place depending on the board you choose you can go to store.camerasnexus.net or patreon.com slash gamersnexus stop that directly subscribe for more we'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 268,199

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, intel i7-11700k cpu review, intel core i7-11700k cpu benchmarks, intel core i7-11700k vs 10700k, intel 11700k review, intel 11700k worth it, intel 11700k vs amd r7 5800x, intel 11700k vs r5 5600x, intel 11700k vs r9 5900x, intel 11700k power consumption, intel 11700k blender, intel 11700k overheating, intel 11700k thermals, best cooler for intel 11700k, best z590 motherboard

Id: S_-p5Zq9u9c

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Sgtkeebler]

Guys should I buy this processor or the i9-10900k trying to decide by tomorrow morning

[u/shamittomar]

Intel and board partners ignoring power draw guidance, name a more iconic duo.

[u/Elon61]

that's.. measurably faster. and hotter.

i would have liked to see unlimited 10700k results though.

[u/Hardin4188]

I don't know if I like this behavior being the default, but I like that it is allowed. It should be clearer to people what they are getting when they buy a certain motherboard. Having said that my question is do all the motherboards do this? And if so are there ones which a person should definitely avoid?

[u/ZillaSquad]

Coming from a colder climate I appreciate the extra heat ;)

[u/H1Tzz]

I generally dont care about power consumption on desktop pc components but man oh man, when you put it into perspective, 5950x a 16-core, 32-threaded cpu at stock uses 50% LESS power than 11700k. Now granted according to my rizen master my 5950x used to draw 180W at unlocked power limits which would be equal but it still packs double the cores of 11700k hmmm just a food for thought...

[u/ohbabyitsme7]

It goes to show how much performance is left on the table for Intel at real stock settings compared to AMD CPUs that have limited gains from OC & power tweaking. Only memory OCing provides significant gains for both Intel & AMD.

[u/vampirepomeranian]

Would it be safe to say the recent sales price of i7-10700K and KF models ($250 - $265) for the user not concerned about PCI-E 4 for the next few years represents the best CPU deal this quarter?

[u/YubranOfDeath]

I knew 11th gen was a Blow out. HEY AMD FX BULLDOZER? You see this?!?

10900k I’ll keep. See what Adler lake Does