Aside from cheaper pricing, one benefit of sticking with the X470 platform would be substantially lower power consumption. ExtremeTech tested the Ryzen 7 3700X on X470 and X570 boards and found that the latter definitely consumes more power. That’s not exactly a surprise, being that it incorporates more sophisticated tech such as PCIe 4.0, but the gaps seem bigger than they should be.
For instance, peak power consumption on the Prime95 29.8b5 test was only 123 watts on the MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC but 157 and 171 on the ASUS X570 Crosshair VII Hero and MSI X570 Godlike, respectively. Idle consumption was only 52 watts on the X470 board, but 58 and 67 watts on the X570 boards.
The point is that the power efficiency of AMD’s latest processors may be even impressive than initial reviews might suggest due to the bias toward X570. ExtremeTech thinks the newer chipset may end up with better efficiency after UEFI updates.
The newer Prime95 shows a dramatic reduction in power consumption on X470 compared with what we measured for X570 in this test. We confirmed the result repeatedly but don’t have an explanation for it. Both X570 motherboards maintain relatively steady power consumption between the two Prime95 variants now, but the X470 motherboard drops by 20W. The MSI Godlike uses 15-16W more than the Asus X570 Crosshair VIII Hero.
The gap between the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 3700X grows here, to nearly 90W. These reductions put the Ryzen 7 3700X on better power efficiency standing than the Core i9-9900K, even after Intel’s CPU pulls its frequency down.