Ryzen 9 7900X Owner Details How To Cut Power Draw In Half With Minimal Performance Loss

If you keep up with hardware news and reviews like ours, then you're no doubt already aware that AMD's Ryzen 7000-series processors run hot by design, and they can be pretty power-thirsty, too. In ages past, we'd fix a problem like this through undervolting, and that's exactly what Reddit user MyKillK has done with his Ryzen 9 7900X.

The benefits? He dropped his CPU package power draw down to just 97 watts—a drop of around half from the stock value. This had effects on his temperatures too, as you can imagine. While Zen 4 CPUs are designed to ride the ragged edge of their thermal limit at 95°C, MyKillK's 7900X is staying at a relatively-cool 75°C under "the most extreme testing," which sounds like OCCT AVX Linpack based on his other comments.

The Redditor admits that he's not completely sure the system is totally stable, but that it hasn't given him any trouble despite constant usage and brief stress testing over the last day and change since his original post. Most likely, the thing most affecting his performance is the -100 MHz PBO boost override setting. It certainly helps with stability but will drop performance slightly.

We haven't tested undervolting with the Ryzen 7000 series yet, but it looks like AMD's gone for pretty high safety margins. It's possible that AMD was concerned about competing with Intel's forthcoming Raptor Lake CPUs, and that's why it elected to push the chips so far past their frequency/voltage sweet spot. Whatever the actual reason, it's clear that Zen 4 users interested in tweaking can drastically reduce the power consumption of their new CPUs without shaving too much performance off the top.