Intel Core 2 Chipset Power Consumption Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 12, 2006 12:53 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test
We did our best to make this a chipset power consumption comparison, but in reality it is just as much of a motherboard power consumption shootout as a chipset one. All extra features -- things like Wireless LAN and IEEE-1394 support -- were disabled to level the playing field as much as possible between platforms. All memory timings and BIOS settings (where applicable) were set identically across all three systems, and of course we used the same physical CPU, power supply, memory and video card for each system to avoid any variation between components.
Our testing methodology was simple: we ran through our usual suite of CPU performance tests, varying only the motherboard, but also recorded power consumption for the duration of each benchmark (beginning when the benchmark starts measuring performance and concluding when it is done measuring performance). Using an Extech 380803 Power Analyzer we were able to log the instantaneous power consumption of our test systems every half a second, giving us reasonable accuracy, especially for the longer tests. For each benchmark that we ran, we plotted performance, total system power consumption and performance per watt.
We were able to run almost all of our tests while measuring power consumption with the exception of PC WorldBench 5, the reason being that some of the WorldBench tests were too short to get accurate power measurements with. We are working on a solution and hope to present WorldBench power consumption numbers in future articles.
| CPU: | Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz/4MB) |
| Motherboard: | ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (975X) ASUS P5B Deluxe (P965) ASUS P5NSLI (nForce 570 SLI) |
| Chipset: | Intel 975X Intel P965 NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | NVIDIA 8.22 Intel 8.1.1.1001 |
| Hard Disk: | Seagate 7200.9 300GB SATA |
| Memory: | Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 (1GB x 2) |
| Video Card: | XFX GeForce 7900 GS |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 91.47 |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1280 x 1024 - 32-bit @ 60Hz |
| OS: | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
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wwswimming - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
3 of the best Motherboards you can get, all i think with the extra-stable 8 phase power - and you have 'em all in one line-up.
Can i work at Anandtech ? :-)
8steve8 - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
(even when disabled these parts likely take some power)8steve8 - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
im curious, what about g965 with onboard video...also , i think u should have used more minimalistic boards... otherwise the power could be drained on the additional features like wifi or a 2nd nic card or whathaveyou
ATWindsor - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
It's interesting to see the diffrent between chipsets. The chipsets seems to have started t use quite a bit of power. Hopefully you will be able to do more detailed test some time in the futire, load on diffrent rails and so on.Lonyo - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
The HL2 640x480 numbers for the 975 look really wrong (198 fps vs ~230 for the other 2 chipsets).Anonymous Freak - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
You'd need to test the power consumption of multiple brands of motherboard using the same chipset. This could just be an Asus thing. (After all, the Intel chipset boards are "Deluxe" while the nVidia chipset board isn't. Maybe they actually spent engineering efford to cut down on power draw on the Deluxe boards.)Also, for a review interested in power consumption, I'd like to see comparisons not just with a dedicated video card, but also with the integrated video of appropriate chipsets. For example, I play almost no games, and actually WOULD like to save as much energy as possible. What motherboard/CPU/GPU combo will give me the best media encoding performance bang per watt? (A Via nano ITX board probably would win in performance per watt, but with unacceptably low performance.)
edwardhchan - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
All this tells me is that Asus's P965 mobo uses less than their 975X and 570 SLI mobos. It'd be better to compare across brands (using the same chipsets available from each brand.) Then you verify your result.atenza - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
Am I the only one interested in idle consumption of those systems?mongo lloyd - Friday, October 13, 2006 - link
Me too. Most computers, especially the ones that are running 24/7 (which is more and more prevalent today), are idle for a guesstimate of about 90% of the time. Really.I was disappointed in this article as well, because they really should've taken that into regard (and made it the most important thing as well).
SocrPlyr - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - link
No, I am interested as well. My computer is kept in a relatively enclosed space. My P4 used to be completely quiet before this, and now is loud b/c the fans are spinning a lot faster. Of course I am not looking to keep the P4, but I am planning on upgrading soon. This basically let me know what I wanted to know and it becomes a no brainer in chipset choice for my application. Here I can get the less expensive chipset and still save on power. I am carefully choosing all of my components for my next build. I want as much integrated as possible and do things like have only 1 optical drive and go down from 3 HDD to 2 etc. (And of course get a cpu that uses less power.) Now for the person who said that a few watt doesn't mean anything, if you get a few watts out of 5 coponents that is a significant power savings for the system as a whole.Josh