A Deep Dive Into The Power & Thermals For The Framework Desktop With AMD Ryzen AI Max
With the Mozilla Firefox performance on the Framework Desktop, there wasn't any performance benefit to the added cooling -- to no real surprise at all given the browser tasks aren't too demanding. The different thermal sensors monitored also just confirmed the obvious of the CPU fan always being on or adding a front fan helped reduce the temperatures but ultimately didn't lead to any performance change for basic web browsing tasks.
With the graphics/gaming workloads the added cooling did help deliver slightly better performance out of the Radeon 8060S with Ryzen AI Max+ 395. With the front Noctua fan installed and running at full fan speeds, the Framework Desktop was seeing around 5% higher frame-rates with the Xonotic game. The front fan and full fan speed run led to an average CPU core temperature around 61 degrees compared to 69~70 degrees in the other configurations. The peak also dropped from around 80 degrees to 74 degrees. The GPU temperature sensor reported a similar difference.
In some of the other graphics/GPU benchmarks there was slight gains out of running with a front fan and full fan speed but was typically a few percent or less.