CPU Performance/Power Trade-offs

[lumip]

Hey folks,

around the turn of the year with all the new CPUs coming out being immense power guzzlers I was trying to find some reliable information on undervolting and power limiting and how that would affect performance for different models. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a nice database for that. So I tried to come up with something of my own, based on the few data points I found for that.

The result is a small website which allows to compare a number of CPU models at different power levels or power-per-price points in a somewhat interactive fashion.

I realize that the data is by now somewhat outdated (missing Intel 13th gen and Ryzen 7 non-X models), so I consider this mostly as a prototype of something that would be nice-to-have in the long term. But I thought I'd share it with you anyways in the hope that someone might find it useful or at least interesting, so here we go:

https://cpupowerscaling.info
 

Unfortunately I cannot currently afford to get all the different hardware required to update this to the newest CPUs, but if someone has the hardware and would be interested in contributing some data in the spirit of e.g. the overclocking database here, I'd be more than happy to include that. If people would be interested in that, I can also set up some submission form when I have time in the next few days. Let me know!

Cheers,
lumip

[Bob__]

12 minutes ago, lumip said:

Hey folks,

around the turn of the year with all the new CPUs coming out being immense power guzzlers I was trying to find some reliable information on undervolting and power limiting and how that would affect performance for different models. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a nice database for that. So I tried to come up with something of my own, based on the few data points I found for that.

The result is a small website which allows to compare a number of CPU models at different power levels or power-per-price points in a somewhat interactive fashion.

I realize that the data is by now somewhat outdated (missing Intel 13th gen and Ryzen 7 non-X models), so I consider this mostly as a prototype of something that would be nice-to-have in the long term. But I thought I'd share it with you anyways in the hope that someone might find it useful or at least interesting, so here we go:

https://cpupowerscaling.info
 

Unfortunately I cannot currently afford to get all the different hardware required to update this to the newest CPUs, but if someone has the hardware and would be interested in contributing some data in the spirit of e.g. the overclocking database here, I'd be more than happy to include that. If people would be interested in that, I can also set up some submission form when I have time in the next few days. Let me know!

Cheers,
lumip

What kind of CPUs are you looking for, I got 15% performance increase with a i5-13600K and a huge OC but its also taking like 3x the power (cinebench r23 23.5K-27K and 110W-325W)

 

Oh and if it helps then I used a MSI Z690 PRO-A

[Mister Woof]

unless you're in a mini itx or some other thermally constrained scenario, undervolting and its accompanying stability issues/testing isn't worth your time. Most often CPUs wont be pulling full load in typical workloads anyway, and the majority of your power usage is going to be at idle in which case it's kind of a wash.

 

In regards to full load power, it gets your job done faster anyway, so that scales somewhat relative to power cost.

 

we're talking about generally less power consumption than a few old school light bulbs.

[OddOod]

Welcome to the forums!
I agree with Woof, unless you derive specific joy from this type of testing and have systems in place to deal with the instability, I'd stay away from undervolting. The only exception I can think of would be if you live somewhere with wicked high power bills

[lumip]

Thanks @Mister Woof and @OddOod for the advice and words of caution. I will likely wait a bit longer for my next build anyways and opt for some stable option then, so this is mostly out of curiosity right now.

@Bob__ thanks for sharing the data. Unfortunately I cannot yet correlated Cinebench scores with the PassMark ones I used so far, but I'll see if I can make that work in the future.