Minecraft CPU Benchmarks: Power Consumption

I also tested power consumption of all the systems, both at idle and while playing some versions of Minecraft.

Idle Power Consumption

Idle power consumption is an interesting topic, especially since AMD got back into the scene in 2017 with Ryzen. Their CPUs are very efficient at computing things, but they are quite bad when not doing anything, but for that AMD has a few power management tricks which kick in, so I decided to test two types of "idle".

There is "true idle", which is no applications running, no user input, nothing - you might as well just turn the computer off instead to save power.
Then there is "light use", which in my case for testing was the mere act of moving the mouse, nothing more. I did this intentionally to make it apparent that AMD Ryzen simply has idle power issues, as this will pop up during basic web browsing, video playback, etc.

It isn't a lot of power that we are talking about here, but it can be a decent chunk over time if you mainly use your computer lightly. This further compounds if you buy a higher end motherboard, for which I included the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with a high end X570 motherboard (which merely provides the same features as the low end Intel B760 motherboard for the Core i7-12700KF).

Minecraft Power Consumption

Power consumption while playing Minecraft is quite similar across all the configurations with the only notable exception being the ancient AMD FX-8350.

Now whole system power consumption isn't all that useful when each system performs differently, so below I recalculated the average power draw and framerate into joules per frame. Now we are comparing how much energy each system uses to render a single frame, and now it is a lot clearer.

For example now you can see the higher power Ryzen 9 7900X3D, Ryzen 7 5800X3D and Core i7-12700KF are actually the most efficient as they produce high enough framerates to more than compensate for their higher power use.

You can also see I left the FX-8350 uncolored, that is intentional since leaving it in the color gradient skewed it so much that everything else was pure green, it is truly amazing how inefficient this CPU is, certainly times AMD would rather forget ever happened.

There is one clear trend, which you can't see in the above tables since it was extra testing I did on the side, but the 3D V-Cache helps AMD's Minecraft efficiency immensely, not directly as a result of the extra cache, but rather because it imposes a rather low voltage limit which pushes the chip into a much more efficient point on the voltage/frequency curve. I didn't do this with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D as I didn't want to take it out of my main system (power hungry X570), but I did test the two chiplets of the Ryzen 9 7900X3D, which you can see in the table below.

As can be seen, it is a roughly 20W power saving for around the same performance, +-5%. And the V-Cache chiplet will generally offer better 1% lows.