11 - Game performance and Power Consumption

Gaming: Call of Duty 4

Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die ... and then continue the game in the past.

Amazing look at that ... interestingly enough COD4 benefits from CPU differences in the higher resolutions from more processor power, meaning in the lower resolutions our graphics card is the  bottleneck.

Among the 780G and GF8200 mainboards very marginal differences. The X6800 kicks in harder, though that processor is just clocked much faster.

Power consumption

Alright then, let's monitor something besides performance... power consumption.

Actually not bad, but not as good as I hope. In an idle state the GF8200A mainboard with no graphics card installed utilized 129 Watt, with a graphical card installed you'll jump towards 145 Watt. Mind you that we had CPU power saving functions disabled as we do not want to influence the previously shown benchmarks.

Once we start utilizing the four CPU cores the wattage jumps up quickly. I still find the Phenom X4 processors to be a tad on the power hungry side.