Does Epic Games Launcher really make Ryzen CPUs throttle & raise temps?

There has been lot of speculation off recently about Epic Games Launcher and its CPU utilization at idle usage and also the temperature rising issues as well. Recently, a post on the /r/AMD subreddit, HotHardware and VideoCardz posted articles regarding this issue especially with AMD Ryzen CPUs.

Now, to prove this wrong, Jim from AdoredTV also wrote about this to be common on both AMD and Intel CPUs. This is indeed true and I have check this out myself on two variants of AMD CPUs and on an Intel CPU as well, this is mostly because Epic Game Launcher sends 14x as much data as Steam and NVIDIA Experience while still working in the background. 

This results in higher single-core speeds along with higher CPU utilizations and some temperature issues as well. Videocardz saw around 10% of GPU usage and around 3% to 6% CPU usage when the app runs in the background.

So I tested this out on my laptop that runs on AMD Ryzen 7 4700U:

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The least noticeable difference I found was on a notebook and while running Epic Game Launcher the CPU utilization was around 4-6% whereas when turned off, it fell to 1% as you see a noticeable difference in number of processes and threads.

Now, tested on a PC with Ryzen 5 5600X:

While doing some browsing and work my CPU utilization was around 14% while keeping the Epic Game Launcher on and after it was turned off, the utilization fell to 11% as well as the CPU temperature fell by 5 degree Celsius.

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Now when ideal, the usage was about 4%, while running the Epic Game Launcher in background, and the temperatures were 45 degrees Celsius. Having turned off, the CPU usage fell to 0-1% only and the temps decreased to 36 degrees Celsius, which is 9 degrees difference.

This becomes more significant when you run heavy applications especially games using Epic Game Launcher, so as speculated by others that a 5950X got nearly 20 degrees Celsius hotter with the application running in background does make sense. However, we also checked this issue not only exclusive to AMD but also on Intel CPUs as well.

Check out what we found on our Core i7-10700K:

As you saw earlier with Ryzen CPUs, there were no such huge noticeable differences in clock speeds, but with Intel it does affect lot worse. Now at ideal the Intel CPU was using about 4-6% CPU usage and clock speeds were hovering from 3.2GHz to 4.5GHz.

Now, when Epic Game Launcher was removed from background, the CPU usage came down to 0-1% and the clock speeds to 1.8GHz to 2.4GHz. This is a pretty significant decrease on Intel CPU also, however, the temps were not affected that much.

So, although the consequences may be a bit different but moral of the story is Epic Game Launcher is affecting CPU usage whether its AMD or Intel when running in the background.