Power Consumption and temperatures

Power Consumption and temperatures

The Lynnfield based processors like the Core i7 870 we use today have gotten a bit of a redesign and as such they are very energy friendly processors.

A processor like the Core i7 870 for example has roughly sometimes even more performance than a core i7 920 yet consumes only 95 Watt, and that is with all cores stressed. Next to that, clever power management allows the internal voltages and processors multiplier to drop, core independent.

All three processors launched today have a TDP of 95W, coming from 130W for the Bloomfield Core i7 series that's quite an improvement and it shows this during our measurements:

idle

100% CPU load

P7P55D Deluxe

100

171

MSI P55 GD80

124

162

eVGA p55 SLI Cl

111

182

ECS P55H-AK / 870

101

172

As you can see, these are very respectable numbers. Mind you that this was measured with the P55 motherboard, an SSD, optical drive, 4GB memory and Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. In the the load state only the CPU cores are stressed, the graphics card is idling.

For the best power consumption make sure you have BIOS features like EIST and CE1 enabled and within Windows set your performance mode to balanced (allows the processor to clock down).

Temperatures are very good as well. With an air cooler you can expect temps like these:

This was measured with the help of a CoolIY ALC 240 cooler. Of course results will vary with different mother boards and cooling solutions. But as baseline the temperatures definitely are promising, especially with overclocking in mind.

100% CPU load is 4 cores 100% stressed with Prime 95, voltages are left at default, processor Turbo mode is enabled. Overclocked temps of course will differ, but we'll show you that in a split-second.