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 SYSMark 2004
We start out with SYSMark 2004's Internet Content Creation suite, and from a performance standpoint all three chipsets perform within the margin of error for this benchmark:
Power consumption however is a far more interesting graph than performance, as there is a clear difference between the three chipsets. Intel's P965 comes out on top (in a good way), with the system drawing an average of 127.1W, followed by the 975X with a 2.5% increase in power usage and finally NVIDIA's nForce 570 SLI at 138.1W. While the difference between the P965 and 975X isn't too great, NVIDIA's nForce 570 SLI draws an average of 11W more than the P965, or 8.6%.
Given that all three platforms perform the same, the performance per watt graph isn't very alarming - the lowest power consumer gets the best performance per watt.
The Office Productivity suite in SYSMark 2004 has the nForce 570 SLI slightly underperforming, with the P965 weighing in about 4.5% faster, but still nothing significant.
Once again, it's the power consumption charts that are the most interesting; with a lighter CPU load, the power consumption of the platform manages to stand out more and here the nForce 570 SLI uses 11% more power than the Intel P965.
Performance being virtually equal, the performance per watt graph tells us exactly what we expected to see:
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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