Intel Sandy Bridge E Review

Written by James Gorbold

November 14, 2011 | 16:11

Tags: #comparative #cpu #lga2011 #overclock #overclocking #performance #processor #recommended #sandy-bridge #sandy-bridge-e

Companies: #amd #intel

Power Consumption

For all of the performance tests, we disable all power-saving technology in order to give us a consistent set of results, and also best-case performance numbers - even though technologies such as Intel's SpeedStep might only take microseconds to kick in, that can make a difference in some tests.

However, for the power consumption tests we re-enable everything in order to get a real-world power draw. The power draw is measured via a power meter at the wall, so the numbers below are of total system power draw from the mains, not the power consumption of a CPU itself. Measuring the power draw of any individual component in a PC is tricky to impossible to acheive.

Idle Power Consumption

For this test, we leave the PC doing nothing but displaying the Windows 7 desktop (with Aero enabled) for a few minutes and record the wattage drawn from the wall via a power meter.

Power Consumption (Idle)

Windows Aero enabled

  • AMD FX-8150 (3.6GHz/4.818GHz)
  • Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz/5GHz)
  • AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition (3.3GHz/4.2GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-2600K (3.4GHz/5GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-3930K (3.2GHz/4.7GHz)
  • 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
  • Intel Core i7-990X Extreme Edition (3.46GHz/4.6GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-920 (2.66GHz/4.04GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.3GHz/4.7GHz)
  • 2 x Intel Xeon X5650 (2.66GHz/3.8GHz)
  • 2 x Intel Xeon X5680 (3.33GHz/4.37GHz)
    • 110
    • 126
    • 114
    • 131
    • 117
    • 183
    • 118
    • 136
    • 132
    • 200
    • 140
    • 0
    • 152
    • 208
    • 158
    • 222
    • 179
    • 210
    • 189
    • 298
    • 193
    • 320
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
Watts, lower is better
  • Stock Speed
  • Overclocked

Load Power Consumption

For this test, we want to only stress the CPU, so use the smallfft stress test of Prime95 to fully load all available processors (logical as well as physical). We leave Aero enabled, and wait a few minutes for any power saving technology to kick in and for the power consumption to level out before taking our reading.

Power Consumption (Load)

Windows Aero enabled

  • Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz/5GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-2600K (3.4GHz/5GHz)
  • AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition (3.3GHz/4.2GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-920 (2.66GHz/4.04GHz)
  • AMD FX-8150 (3.6GHz/4.818GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-3930K (3.2GHz/4.7GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-990X Extreme Edition (3.46GHz/4.6GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.3GHz/4.7GHz)
  • 2 x Intel Xeon X5650 (2.66GHz/3.8GHz)
  • 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
  • 2 x Intel Xeon X5680 (3.33GHz/4.37GHz)
    • 162
    • 311
    • 180
    • 313
    • 236
    • 498
    • 243
    • 411
    • 244
    • 586
    • 252
    • 525
    • 263
    • 423
    • 289
    • 538
    • 324
    • 627
    • 335
    • 0
    • 394
    • 774
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
Watts, lower is better
  • Stock Speed
  • Overclocked

Note: the AMD chips were tested in an ATX motherboard, while the Intel LGA1155 chips were tested in a micro-ATX board. This difference can account for up to 20W, as we found in our Energy Efficient Hardware feature.

Read our Performance Analysis for the i7-3960X and i7-3930K
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