A Deep Dive Into The Power & Thermals For The Framework Desktop With AMD Ryzen AI Max
Long story short, with the exception of a few graphics/gaming benchmarks, adding the Noctua NF-A8 front intake fan didn't lead to any faster results nor did running the fans constantly at full-speed. When taking the geometric mean of more than 230 benchmarks, the performance was comparable overall.
Making the biggest difference was running with the two Noctua fans at full fan speed that saw around 5 degree lower CPU core temperatures during the 17 hours of benchmarking.
Similarly, the Radeon 8060S core temperature was also around 4 degrees lower on average and the peak temperature at 7~11 degrees lower than the other configurations. Even just running with the Noctua NF-A8 front fan in the default PWM profile led to lower peak temperatures for the GPU.
Across the span of the 17 hours of benchmarking, the WD_BLACK SN7100 saw nice benefit from the Noctua NF-A8 front fan and then especially when keeping the fan speeds maxed out -- albeit with the increased noise.
The NF-A8 front fan led to the memory temperature dropping by only around one degree on average but when running the fan speeds maxed out was around 5 degrees lower and the peak temperature about 9 degrees lower.
Looking at the peak CPU frequency obtained in each of the different configurations showed no real difference out of the extra cooling options for the Framework Desktop.
Across all the 230+ benchmarks run, the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 had an average power consumption of ~68 Watts and a peak of 116 Watts.
When looking at the AC system power consumption for the "wall power" using a WattsUp Pro, the Framework Desktop with the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and 128GB of RAM was consuming 100~104 Watts on average with a peak of around 180 Watts.
Again see this result file page to dig through all of the benchmarks in full along with all of the associated thermal/power data for each benchmark. While the Noctua front intake fan and full-fan-speed-configuration helped lower operating temperatures, with the exception of some graphics/GPU benchmarks there wasn't any other performance difference observed. The default/out-of-the-box cooling for the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" was good enough. Even with the Noctua NF-A8 front intake fan the Framework Desktop remained very quiet and only when keeping the fans maxed out was it really noticeable but still not as bad as some of the larger desktops in the lab.
For those that have been asking for more idle data on the Framework Desktop... Here is the results when idling the Framework Desktop with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 in its default configuration for 30 minutes:
The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 idled at around 4 Watts.
The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 temperature was around 31 degrees.
At idle the Framework Desktop AC wall power via the WattsUp Pro monitoring was at a 12 Watt average.
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