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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>Yes, Intel is drawing way more power for super CPU intensive tasks, but for what most people will be doing, it's pretty even.

This. I honestly don't get why people are so focused suddenly on the power consumption for a desktop CPU designed for enthusiasts who want top performance at any cost.

GPUs are consuming way more power than that(Nvidia's Ampere is a notorious power hog), pushing consumers to 700W+ PSUs and nobody bats an eye, but seem to throw their hands in the air when their CPUs get close to that of a GPU.

Like why? It's the top spec model, it's supposed to be ludicrous, not be good value for money or highly efficient, they have other models more competitive for that. It feels like people are just looking for reasons to to create outrage about a product they're not gonna buy anyway.

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> I honestly don't get why people are so focused suddenly on the power consumption for a desktop CPU designed for enthusiasts who want top performance at any cost.

Because if you up the Power/Current limits on a Ryzen, they will run faster - especially in tests like Cinebench. You won't even have to 'overclock' them. Simply allow them to draw more power if your cooling, motherboard, and PSU can handle it.

To make that a fair test the tester would have had to crank those settings up as far as they go, or until they match the Intel processor. If the Intel processor is allowed to draw 250W, the Ryzen should get the same treatment.

For example a Ryzen 5900X at ~135W (CPU Package) should score around 8200 in Cinebench r20, and at ~200W it should score around 8900.

Since in the test those 200W are apparently for the whole system, it's pretty obvious the tester left those at the stock values.

So will Intels parts and so will GPUs for that matter.

It's still overclocking.

PBO will drive a 5950X to something like 310W in some applications.

Overclocking is running a CPU at higher clock speeds than advertised.

If you just change PBO limits, it never goes beyond what AMD knows their silicon can handle, and what is sold to the customer. Individual cores might already be boosting to those clock speeds over short intervals. You're just allowing more cores to do that and longer, within your configured power limits. The expectation here is thermal throttling, not an unstable system.

Oh please.

No one pretends PBO is not overclocking. Not even AMD:

> Precision Boost 2 is a performance-maximizing technology available in all AMD Ryzen™ and Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 2000 Series processors (or newer). This technology can improve your PC’s performance by raising clockspeeds

And PBO still voids your warranty and does not magically respect some limit: https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/understanding-precision-...

> Because Precision Boost Overdrive enables operation of the processor outside of specifications and in excess of factory settings, use of the feature invalidates the AMD product warranty and may also void warranties offered by the system manufacturer or retailer.

Reply because I'm getting rate limited, probably over that one time I wasn't nice to dang

> Changing these values will not make your CPU reach voltages it wouldn't otherwise have reached, nor will it make your CPU reach clock speeds it wouldn't otherwise hit.

This is patently false! I don't know where you got this idea when I literally just quoted AMD saying it raises clocks past factory specifications!

Also sure where you think the additional power draw comes from...

AMD literally uses the tagline: "Precision Boost Overdrive: A Smarter Way to Overclock" -

I see no point in continuing a conversation with someone who doesn't understand the basic tenets of the technology they're trying to split hairs over.

PBO is overclocking. Simple as that.

PBO allows overclocking[1]. But it mainly allows you to configure other stuff, liking raising/lowering certain limits, that are not overclocking. Changing these values will not make your CPU reach voltages it wouldn't otherwise have reached, nor will it make your CPU reach clock speeds it wouldn't otherwise hit. It will however make your CPU draw more amps and use more watts to sustain clocks for longer than normal and on more cores at once.

Allowing here means that in the typical motherboard you'll have to change PBO from the default "Auto" to "Manual" to see these settings.

Where do terms like "undervolting", "overvolting", "setting TDP" even fit in your vocabulary if you insist everything is to be called "overclocking"? These terms should be literally self-explanatory.

[1] But only technically, because for some reason the AutoOC feature is found in the PBO menu on motherboards, even though AutoOC is not part of PBO. They are however typically marketed together.

That's not a very technical article, though.

Are you calling this explanation completely wrong?: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3491-explaining-precision... This is someone who should really know what they're talking about.

> What is important to note is that PBO only affects these three power limits. The effect on CPU clock speed is indirect, and PBO will never boost the CPU past the advertised clocks.

I think it's fair to say adjusting power limits falls under a deliberately broad "overclocking" umbrella, but it's not really overclocking, and doesn't require you to do the effort part of real overclocking.

> This is patently false! I don't know where you got this idea when I literally just quoted AMD saying it raises clocks past factory specifications!

The part you quoted doesn't have the word 'clocks'.

> The part you quoted doesn't have the word 'clocks'.

If you don't know clocks is slang for clockspeed, you're out of your depth. So just stop talking.

> This technology can improve your PC’s performance by raising clockspeeds

And you're saying that technical documents from AMD don't know what they're talking about (it's a technical document. It's a technical article.)

But GN, the kings of stating guesses confidently with the worst understanding of statistics I've ever seen to an uninformed crowd do?

Please. I don't even care how you cope with PBO being an overclock anymore, call it a "raising clock speeds over stock" if it helps you sleep.

> If you don't know clocks is slang for clockspeed, you're out of your depth. So just stop talking.

I phrased that badly. I was talking about the second quote there.

It's a little bit subtle.

The first quote says it will raise clock speeds.

The second quote says it will operate outside of specifications.

But nowhere does it say the clock speeds will be outside the specification.

It's raising the power limits outside the specification so that it can raise clock speeds inside the specification.

> And you're saying that technical documents from AMD don't know what they're talking about (it's a technical document. It's a technical article.)

If you can quote me something from AMD that specifically says PBO (not AutoOC) raises the maximum clock speed above the number you can boost to within spec, I will admit I was wrong and apologize. But the page you linked doesn't say that.

> To make that a fair test the tester would have had to crank those settings up as far as they go, or until they match the Intel processor.

The test was perfectly fair because they used the CPU as delivered, as the average user would use it.

Nobody is buying these CPUs to overclock them to a specific power usage. They're either running them stock or running them at whatever comfortable overclock they can get away with.

Test stock versus stock and overclocked versus overclocked. Trying to normalize to specific power consumption doesn't make sense for enthusiast builds.

> Trying to normalize to specific power consumption doesn't make sense for enthusiast builds.

You surely mean "for low end" builds? Because for enthusiast builds it makes a lot of sense.

Why would you set up "enthusiast" level cooling that can handle 200W and higher, and then keep your CPU set to the default 135W?

At that point one should be buying prebuilt and hope the manufacturer properly sets up the system, because one clearly can't.

"Nobody is buying these CPUs to overclock them to a specific power usage"

I am my friends are these 'nobody', we cant be arsed to overclock but want them to use all power avaliable

Intel have a rich and storied history of paying for biased and dishonest reviews. You should be thankful that people are willing to fill in the gaps so you hear the full story.

Because there isn't a proportional performance gain, and the heat generated will degrade the computer, at what cost? A few irrelevant percentage points?

If you're concerned about proportional performance gains, this product isn't for you. So why are you complaining about something you're not gonna buy anyway?

Most tech products that are the tip of the spear are bad value for money and less energy efficient than the ones down the range (Nvidia 3090 vs 3080 for example) as they pass the point of diminishing returns of what the design can do and what's cheap and easy to manufacture.

But they exist because there is a marke of enthusiasts for whom efficiency or price does not matter, they just want the best performance money can buy because maybe their business use case benefits from the 10% shorter render/compile times at the cost of 50% extra power consumption. Who are you to judge?

To feel better about my non Intel purchase by laughing at the performance.

If that is true they should be comparing it to the Epyc 7763 or other CPUs that aren't meant to be reasonably priced. No reason a true enthusiast would pick this CPU over Epyc.

>To feel better about my non Intel purchase by laughing at the performance.

That just sounds childish.

It’s a self deprecating joke, dude. People make these to de-escalate situations safely. I sometimes really wonder at the social skills of people on this website.

>It’s a self deprecating joke, dude.

Jokes are usually meant to be funny.

>I sometimes really wonder at the social skills of people on this website.

One's social skills are not defined by comprehension of poor attempts at snarky humor on the internet.

> they should be comparing it to the Epyc 7763

That's a server chip/line, no? And therefore will have significantly worse per-core performance, one of the most important things for non-embarrassingly-parallel compute tasks?

Edit: and after a cursory search, is it not also true that Epyc line is 4-8x higher priced than the 12900k MSRP?

heat barely degrades consumer pc components, and certainly not on timescales dominated by Moores law.

You really believe that? Feel free run your computer after you take off the heatsinks of your computer, removing all the fans, and removing all the heatsink paste if you truly believe heat doesn't degrade pc components. Feel free to post the results.

you should feel bad for posting such an obviously obtuse comment in bad faith

I don’t, because you are wrong about heat. Heat matters to everyone. If heat didn’t matter on regular timescales graphics cards would never break and crypto miners wouldn’t care about their hardware getting hot.

how do you explain benchmarks showing no difference between used and new gpu performance? if a card posts its age is not a concern

https://youtu.be/44JqNJq-PC0

https://youtu.be/hKqVvXTanzI

The 480 was probably barely used and the mining GPU are used at low power and controlled temperatures. It proves my point.

Old doesn’t mean heat abused. Gaming laptops or ones with discrete GPUs often have issues and it’s always because of the GPU. If it posts it doesn’t mean that the GPU won’t die soon or is problem free, gaming laptops have the most heat abuse and are constantly dying and having issues. Performance degradation because it’s old is a different claim from saying heat damage doesn’t exist.

But we're talking a small lead in many cases, a lot of times a tie, for 30% higher power draw here.

feels like m1 broke a lot of people's brains about performance-per-watt. like, maybe that metric matters if you're running a laptop that has a battery and physically heats up your lap. but nobody with a desktop pc cares about a 100w tdp difference so long as the chips can be cooled

I care about a 100W TDP difference in that a cheap cooler will sound like a jet engine, and a powerful cooler will cost more, in addition to a hot CPU making my room warmer.

who are these mythical consumers that are so price sensitive for a $100 cooler but not when it comes to an $800+ cpu

it affects cooling. gpu dies are way bigger than cpu dies. a cpu that draws almost as much power as a high end gpu is way more difficult to cool. I don't really care about price/performance that much, but I don't want my pc to sound like a jet engine at load.

> I honestly don't get why people are so focused suddenly on the power consumption for a desktop CPU designed for enthusiasts who want top performance at any cost.

These are individuals with an interest in harming Intel and propping up AMD.

Intel is doing a fine job themselves in terms of harming intel and propping up AMD. Intel themselves has focused on power efficiency after ivy bridge, and people care about energy bills and being green.

Who do you recommend this CPU to?

"These are individuals with an interest in harming Intel and propping up AMD"

Harming the compaby that was fines billions for market manipukation against AMD?

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