Power Consumption and temperatures

Power Consumption and temperatures

The new Core i5 / i7 processors have gotten a bit of a redesign and are very energy friendly processors, well... as long as you do not overclock them that is. A processor like the Core i7 870 for example has more performance than a core i7 920 yet consumes only 95 Watt, and that is with all cores stressed. Next to that, clever power management allows the internal voltages and processors multiplier to drop, core independent.

All Lynnfield processors have a TDP of 95W, coming from 130 for the Bloomfield Core i7 series that's quite an improvement and it shows this during our measurements:

As you can see, these are very respectable numbers. Mind you that these tests are done with a P55 motherboard, an SSD, optical drive, 4GB memory and Radeon HD 5870. You can also see that the ASUS is average in power consumption, this is due to internal tweaks and overclocks. Heck this is a ROG board, optimized for performance and that can cost a watt or ten more.

For the best power consumption make sure you have BIOS features like EIST and CE1 enabled and within Windows set your performance mode to balanced (allows the processor to clock down).

Temperatures are very good under control. With an air cooler you can expect temps like these:

idle

100% CPU load

Maximus III Extreme

27~33

48~52

This test was conducted with a Thermalright MUX 120 air based cooler. Of course results will vary with different motherboards and cooling solutions. But as baseline the temperatures definitely are promising, especially with overclocking in mind.

100% CPU load is 4 cores 100% stressed with Prime 95, voltages are left at default, processor Turbo mode is enabled. Overclocked temps of course will differ, but we'll show you that in a split-second.