Power Consumption and temperatures

Sandy Bridge Power Consumption and temperatures

Here's where we'll slowly move into actually testing the processors and respective chipsets.

The new Sandy Bridge based processors are a bit of a redesign alright and as a result they are quite energy friendly processors. What you'll notice a lot is that in idle these things kick ass in matters of power consumption, whereas at peak TDP they behave quite normally.

Unfortunately, once you insert a dedicated graphics card things change quickly. When we add a GeForce GTX 580 for example that IDLE power consumption jumps upwards.

The motherboard demands a little more power though that can be tweaked in the BIOS as you'll get several power state options. We choose a normal power state.

Without graphics card installed (Intel processor IGP):

• We average out at roughly 47W idle.
• Once we stress the CPU cores overall power consumption went up towards 130W

With a graphics card installed (GeForce GTX 580):

• We average out at roughly 87W idle.
• Once we stress the CPU cores overall power consumption went up towards 166W

Wattages will always differ per PC. Higher wattages in-between the same chipset based motherboards can be explained due to the use of many extra chips, like the extra USB 3.0 controllers, Hydra IC, PLX switch chips, extra SATA controllers, USB HUB ands so on.

Temperature wise, 2500 and 2600 processors are roughly the same. The results above are based on the a CoolIT ECO ALC unit. Temperatures differ per choice in cooling of course. Here we have the motherboard setup in LOW RPM (Silent mode), setting them at normal mode resulted into roughly 50 degrees C temps under load.