Intel Core 2 Chipset Power Consumption Shootout

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: