Power Consumption - Stock

Alder Lake Power Usage

On the chart below you will see that Alder Lake is very efficient for light workloads and idle periods. The chart below shows the total system wattage. The chart does not include additional wattage for a discrete GPU so only the CPU, RAM and Motherboard wattage is shown below. Light usage such as opening browsers, opening folders or apps shows that Alder Lake consumes roughly 74Watts. That number drops to 65Watts if the PC isn’t being used. While running Cinebench R23 the app ramps up the CPU utilization and the voltage. The system pulls 330Watts during the benchmark. The Alder Lake CPU itself only used approximately 214watts on average using software based monitoring.

Alder Lake CPU Temperature

The CPU Package temperature showed an average of 79c in Cinebench R23. The peak temperature reached 81c. The CPU Package is overall temperature that we should pay attention to, but I also wanted to also show the average for all of the P-Cores and E-Cores as well. Only focusing on the P-Cores we see an average of 74c. The E-Cores shows an everage of 61c. For the record I am using a LGA1200 (Comet & Rocket Lake Socket) EK-360mm AIO CPU Cooler so if you have less than a 360mm radiator without powerful fans then your temps might be slightly higher. I am still waiting on the actual LGA1700 mounting bracket (Alder Lake Socket). Most users won’t run their CPU at 100% utilization most of the time and of course if the CPU becomes too warm Intel has built-in tech to throttle the performance. Intel tech will monitor the thermals and wattage to control the performance. There are many overclocking features to disable certain power wattage and thermal features so be careful and ensure that you have adequate cooling.

To see how much of a beating the CPU AIO Liquid Cooled 360mm Radiator could take I decided to run Prime95’s torture test. The benchmark showed that the CPU temps averaged 90c and the peak temperature was 92c. Prime95 torture test is for extreme use only and stress testing the machine. It will never present a typical workload under normal circumstances. However, it was interesting to see the P-Cores increase by 10c and the E-Cores increase by 12c. Overall I feel that the 360mm AIO does a good job and unless you are planning to go for extremely high voltage overclocks you won’t have much to worry about. The limit for Alder Lake CPUs appears to 100c. At 100c the CPU will throttle and you will lose some performance. I am sure it is possible to disable this behavior, but I wouldn’t risk it if I were you.