Intel Core 2 Chipset Power Consumption Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 12, 2006 12:53 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Gaming Performance & Power Usage with Quake 4
At 640 x 480, we're not GPU bound at all so power consumption isn't nearly as high as it could be, but performance is. In theory this configuration should be stressing the chipset more than anything when it comes to power usage.
The P965 continues to be the lower power solution, with the nForce 570 SLI drawing over 6% more power on average during the course of the benchmark.
Obviously the winner of the performance per watt test is the P965, by a reasonable margin thanks to its higher performance and lower power consumption. But what happens if we crank up the resolution to a more GPU-bound setting? Will the differences in chipset power consumption get larger or smaller?
At 1280 x 1024 there's no longer a performance difference between the three platforms since we're very GPU bound, but let's see how power consumption changes.
The gap between the P965 and nForce 570 SLI actually grows to 8.5%, and obviously giving the P965 the performance per watt crown.
Let's look at a few other titles before coming to any conclusions though.
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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.