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.

A processor like the Core i5 2500K for example consumes only 106 Watts, and that is with all cores stressed, and that's including a reference H67 chipset, one solid state drive, the memory and active cooler, no dedicated graphics card. Once that processor goes into an IDLE state (and again -- without a dedicated graphics card) we measure merely 34 Watts IDLE power consumption. And that's just crazy.

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 to roughly 63 Watts with a wattage peak of 134W with the four processor cores stressed. That's still really good though.

The SaberTooth demands a little more power BUT, that can be tweaked in the BIOS as you'll get several power state options.

• We average out at roughly 80W idle (with a GeForce GTX 580 - 8GB Memory and one SSD installed).
• Once we stress the CPU cores overall power consumption went up towards 159W

What we also wanted to show you as well is power consumption once overclocked. So we applied a CPU voltage of 1.3V to the processor, apply an overclock to 4600 MHz (on all CPU cores) and again stress the four CPU cores, power consumption now rises to just under 220. And as crazy as that sounds... it's fairly low for an overclock at this level. So that is just really good news.

Temperature wise, both the 2500 and 2600 processors are roughly the same. The results above are based on the reference motherboards, reference clock frequencies and the reference stock Intel CPU cooler.