Intel Core 2 Chipset Power Consumption Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 12, 2006 12:53 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Application Performance & Power Usage with Winstone 2004
Business Winstone 2004 is the first time we actually see a real performance difference, with the nForce 570 SLI ending up on top, outperforming Intel's P965 by a full 10%. With an actual performance difference, this could make the performance per watt comparison quite interesting.
Power consumption is following the same pattern we've already seen: P965 at the top, followed by 975X and then in last place, the nForce 570 SLI. The margins are a lot closer here, with the NVIDIA platform drawing only 6.5% more power than the P965 on average, but it's still measurable.
Looking at performance per watt, the high performance of the nForce 570 SLI balances out its high power consumption to equal the Intel 975X and slightly outpace the P965.
Things go back to normal though in the Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test, with all three platforms basically performing the same.
Given that MMCC Winstone 2004 is a more CPU bound test than Business, it's not a surprise to see a narrower gap in power consumption, with the NVIDIA platform only drawing 4.4% more power than the Intel solution.
With equal performers, the lowest power consumer ends up having the best performance per watt.
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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.