7 - Power consumption| CPU Dhrystone performance

Setup your monitor

Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. As well, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

Power consumption

Alright then, let's get this show on the road first up... power consumption.

In this review you'll learn that, for the money, the GF9300 is not at all a bad performer and eco-system for your PC. But where it really shines is power consumption.

Now I have applied several measurements to the test system and the results are really impressive.

First off we simulate a "work PC" situation. We make use of the integrated graphics solution solely. Next to that 2GB DDR2 memory, one HDD, one DVD-ROM, the GF9200 motherboard and a Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor. A fair working PC right?

As you can see above the results:

• Idle, low profile working mode, 100 Watts
• Same configuration, yet now we stress the 4 CPU cores 100%, 155 Watt.

That's just stunning. This is the first ever mainboard tested that produces such low power requirements with a quad-core processor. So let that soak in a little, a fully fledged fast working system maxes out at 155 Watts. That's just impressive.

Of course gamers will use a dedicated graphics solution. That's where the ball turns a little. If you move up one bar in the graph you'll notice that in the same conditions:

• Idle, low profile working mode, yet + dedicated GPU 147 Watts
• Same configuration, yet now we stress the 4 CPU cores 100%, 204 Watt.

Okay, that is close to a regular system, yet still real far from bad at all as it is below a more regular mid-range PC.

Not included in the chart but what we'll also do today throughout the benchmarks, we'll include results from the PC in a (mildly) overclocked state. The Q6600 processor typically has a 1066 MHz FSB and runs it's four logical CPU cores at 2.4 GHz. We'll overclock at an FSB of 1333 / 3.0 GHZ CPU. Just FYI - we did not have much difference in power consumption in that state at all. Stressed (without dedicated VGA) and the 4 cores at 100% burst, we noticed the system peak at 165-175 Watt.

I must say though, the power management features work great. A very green PC for sure.

DhryStone CPU test

We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test from SiSoftware Sandra, which is basically a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs. Since the whole program should be really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.

The DhryStone test is a pure CPU test that runs completely in the CPU itself. A perfect test to see the general efficiency per core.

Today we focus on the Q6600 on the GF9300 platform, the nForce 680i platform, and then the GF9300 again, yet this time we overclocked the Q6600 from 2.4 GHz to 3.0 GHz (1333 FSB), to see how well it's behaving. From AMD's side we took the fastest processor they have in combo with the best chipset, the Phenom X4 9950 on an AMD 790GX motherboard.

So we are looking at very competitive products here, the Phenom X4 9950 will definitely be faster here and there, as it is the faster product, yet once we overclock... the numbers change.

Colored in deep green, throughout the review you'll also notice the results of the baseline system with no overclock and thus the Q6600.