Power Consumption

Power Consumption

Here's where we'll slowly move into physically testing the processors and respective chipsets. The new Haswell-E based processors are a bit of a redesign alright and as a result they are quite energy needy processors with a 140W TDP. 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.

Interesting - the processor TDP went up a notch - but the new chipset and mobo components make the platform more energy friendly overall.

Above, power consumptions in respect to other processors and platforms. In an IDLE state the PC (X99 / 5960X / 16GB DDR4 memory / GeForce GTX 780 Ti / SSD / LCS) consumes roughly 70 Watts. Mind you, we measure the ENTIRE PC, not just the processor's power consumption.

When we place load on the CPU and we see the power draw rise, the system now consumes roughly 190 Watts. This is merely with the gear as described above installed. Your average PC will draw a little more power if you add optical drives, HDDs, soundcards etc. Overall this is impressive for an 8-core processor setup. In this case the MSI motherboard and X99 shave off a few watts bringing the overall power consumption down a notch.

And here, an overview with some generic PC usage. Overclocked power consumption with added voltage, yes, well we'll discuss that in a later chapter in this article. I want to make it very clear that power consumption measurements will differ per PC and setup. Your attached components use power but your motherboard can also have additional ICs installed like an audio controller, LUCID chips, network controllers, extra SATA controllers, extra USB controllers, and so on. These parts all consume power, so this is an indication.

Next to that, we stress all CPU cores 100% and thus show a PEAK power consumption. Unless you transcode video with the right software your overall/average power consumption will be much lower.

Temperature wise we can't complain either. This is Prime 95 (download v28.40), the temps with a fairly normal liquid cooling kit from Corsair are pretty good. The H105 remains whisper silent.