Intel Core 2 Chipset Power Consumption Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 12, 2006 12:53 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3D Rendering Performance & Power Usage
With a 1% difference in performance between the 975X and the nForce 570 SLI, we can consider these platforms equal once again as far as performance, but what about power consumption?
Couple a heavy CPU load with light memory and I/O traffic and once again we see that there's only around a 5% difference in power consumption between the P965 and the nForce 570 SLI.
Performance per watt ends up being tied between all of the offerings:
The situation is really no different under Cinebench 9.5, with performance being equal across the board.
Power consumption continues to be higher on the NVIDIA platform, but here by less than 4%.
Application Performance & Power Usage with Winstone 2004
Encoding Performance & Power Usage with DivX/WME9
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jonp - Saturday, October 14, 2006 - link
Whoops. Intuitive logic doesn't always pay off. See the following chart which gives energy costs/BTU for 2006: http://www.npga.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=914">DOE Energy Costs . You can see that energy cost from electricity is almost double that of natural gas. You may help heat the building, but it will cost you more. And remember that a lot of electricity comes from coal fired power plants (CO2 producing) and every wire consumes it's own share of energy released as useless heat. Ok probably too much off the chipset topic, sorry.DigitalFreak - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
Quick, call Al Gore!Thanks for the good laugh.
Lonyo - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
10w is not all that inconsiderable, look at it over multiple components and it becomes significant.10w just for the mobo is, IMO, quite a chunk.
smn198 - Friday, October 13, 2006 - link
Could you measure the power draw of just the chipset by increasing the voltage of the northbridge by 0.2V and then re-running the tests? Take the difference between +0.2V and normal and then you would have isolated the power draw for the chipset and can work out the power draw for the chipset alone.