In fairness the motherboard not restricting power usage isn’t a bad thing: it’s not like it’s shoving 4000w through the cpu, it’s just letting the cpu pull as much as it wants which, with a non-defective piece of silicon, is probably fine.
A modern CPU shouldn’t pull enough power that it kills itself, unless there’s a major failure in design or manufacturing.
Sure, the CPU gets hotter with more power and sure, the last 5% of performance is a third of the total power usage and probably not worth chasing, but them’s the design decisions x86 vendors are making right now and the motherboard (assuming it can deliver enough clean power) shrugging and saying ‘whatever’ is, outside factors aside, fine.
Also, that 253w TDP limit on a i7 or i9 is a bit low. Yes Intel’s spec says that, but intel lies like crazy on power usage, and pretty much always has. These are chips that will happily gain performance up to about 400w of total draw, so capping at half that is a bit of a kneecapping, though it MIGHT keep them from failing as fast, but who knows.
In fairness the motherboard not restricting power usage isn’t a bad thing: it’s not like it’s shoving 4000w through the cpu, it’s just letting the cpu pull as much as it wants which, with a non-defective piece of silicon, is probably fine.
A modern CPU shouldn’t pull enough power that it kills itself, unless there’s a major failure in design or manufacturing.
Sure, the CPU gets hotter with more power and sure, the last 5% of performance is a third of the total power usage and probably not worth chasing, but them’s the design decisions x86 vendors are making right now and the motherboard (assuming it can deliver enough clean power) shrugging and saying ‘whatever’ is, outside factors aside, fine.
Also, that 253w TDP limit on a i7 or i9 is a bit low. Yes Intel’s spec says that, but intel lies like crazy on power usage, and pretty much always has. These are chips that will happily gain performance up to about 400w of total draw, so capping at half that is a bit of a kneecapping, though it MIGHT keep them from failing as fast, but who knows.
Thanks for the further detail! I suppose I wasn’t aware that the CPU was still in control of how much power it could draw.