Power Consumption
Being a 6c/12t part with a 65-watt TDP, the Ryzen 3000 should require very little power. Given the relative performance to previous 6c/12t CPU’s on the market with TDP’s approaching double that of the 3600X, I’d say the 3600X is not only very efficient but among the most efficient desktop processors on the market right now.
AMD is using TSCM’s 7nm process while Intel’s using its very mature 14nm+ process. While the Intel process isn’t as efficient, it’s amazing what Intel can do with it. Of course, the Core i5 9600K only has six cores and no Hyperthreading. As a result, it is going to pull very little power compared to the rest of the 9th generation Core family. Even at 5.0GHz, the overall power consumption of the system remains quite low.
Power Graphs
As you can see from the power numbers, the Ryzen 5 3600X pulls about 6 watts more than the 9600K does at idle. However, under load, it’s nearly 40w more efficient offering very similar performance in many tests which we’ll get to later. It is also interesting to note how close the figures are between the Ryzen 5 3600X and the Ryzen 7 3700X.
As you can see, the power consumption increased a slight about idle but increased drastically when overclocked. The 3600X still remains more efficient than the 9600K, but the gap is very small. Oddly, the 9600K doesn’t really increase its power consumption a whole lot for whatever reason.