Power Consumption
Power Consumption
In this segment of the article we'll slowly move into physically testing the processors and respective chipsets.
The new Sandy Bridge E based processors are a bit of a redesign alright and as a result they are quite energy needy processors with a 130W 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.
In an IDLE state the PC (X79 / 3960X / 16GB memory / GeForce GTX 580 / SSD) consumes 104 Watts. Mind you that we measure the ENTIRE PC, not just the processor's power consumption.
I want to make it very clear that power consumption measurements will differ per PC and setup and per motherboard. Your attached components use power but your motherboard can also have additional ICs installed like an audio controller, LUCID chips, SATA chips, USB 3.0 chips, extra network controllers, and so on. These ICs all require and thus consume power.
When we place load on the CPU and we see the power draw rise, the system now consumes roughly 279 Watts. This is with merely an SSD and memory and the GTX580 installed. Your average PC will draw a little more power if you add optical drives, HDDs, soundcards etc.
The load power consumption overall is higher as MSI applies a performance trick for you. We'll explain that in the conclusion though.
Mind you that we stress all CPU cores 100% and thus show a PEAK power consumption, not average. Unless you transcode video with the right software your overall/average power consumption will be much lower.
