Power Consumption and CPU temperatures

Power Consumption

The new Lynnfield based processors in combo on the p55 platform have gotten a bit of a redesign and as such they are very energy friendly processors, well --  as long as you do not overclock them.

A processor like the Core i7 870 for example has roughly sometimes even more performance than a core i7 920 yet consumes merely 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 Lynnfield processors have a TDP of 95W, coming from 130 for the Bloomfield Core i7 series that's quite an improvement and it shows this during our measurements:

idle

100% CPU load

124

162

As you can see, these are very respectable numbers. Mind you that this was done with the P55 motherboard, an SSD, optical drive, 4GB memory and Radeon HD 5870 graphics card.

For the best power consumption make sure you have BIOS features like Speedstep and CE1 enabled and within Windows set your performance mode to balanced (allows the processor to clock down). Power consumption at peak level is a little lower than other P55 motherboards we tested, but as our tests will show .. it's also a little slower.

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

idle

100% CPU load

29~36

44~50

This test was conducted with a Thermalright MUX 120 air based 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 -- CE1 however disabled for benchmarking purposes.