Temperatures

Application temperatures are measured using Blender, a highly demanding rendering load, which will load all cores completely, but that's still realistic and is not a synthetic stress test such as Prime95. For gaming, we picked Cyberpunk 2077, its modern engine is multi-thread aware and will try to spread as many tasks as possible over many CPU cores, when available. Even when a game uses multiple threads it doesn't load each CPU core as heavily as rendering, for example, so there's some scope for power savings here.

Note that unless indicated otherwise, all processors are tested at stock conditions with their power limit active, which is why some Intel temperatures are surprisingly low. As designed by Intel, these CPUs can exceed their TDP for a few seconds (PL2), but in the long term, the power limit (PL1) is respected, which brings temperatures down considerably. Both tests report the steady-state temperature after an extended runtime of at least 10 minutes. Temperatures are based on delta T, normalized to 25°C, that's why the temperature of some CPUs is higher than their throttle point, because the room temperature was below 25°C.

AMD's first-generation Ryzen 7000-series X3D processors, including the 7700X3D, run a lower 89°C thermal target instead of the 95°C used by non-X3D Zen 4—the 3D V-Cache is stacked on top of the cores and can't tolerate as much heat, so AMD caps the temperature to protect it. In practice the 7700X3D stays well clear of that limit anyway: its low 4550 MHz clock and modest power draw keep it at just 69°C in Blender and 55°C while gaming. As on other AM5 processors, this limit can't be raised.