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Power Consumption

Intel has made a big deal out of how Conroe uses a lot less power - is there anything to it?

Well, we decided to run a couple of simple tests.

We measured the number of watts being drawn from the AC outlet by the computer system, not including the monitor, but including the water cooler.

We ran the system idle and measured the load, then we ran the system with two copies of CPU Burn-in running to induce 100% load on both cores. After giving the sytem plenty of time to settle down, we recorded the readings, for both a loaded and idle system at both the stock 2.66GHz and the maximum overclocked 3.32GHz clock rates. 

Keep in mind that these results are not showing isolated CPU power consumption, but total power draw, but given all other components being equal (except for motherboard across AMD and Intel setups) this is a fair indication of relative CPU power consumption.

Here are the results:

Personally, I think those are excellent numbers! I think Intel did a good job on keeping power consumption under control.

How good are these numbers?

Let's compare them to the results from the results in the X2 5000+ review...

Intel did a REALLY good job. The power consumption is a LOT lower than previous generation parts!  Note how the E6700 system draw when OC'd to 3.32GHz is lower than the load system draw of a Pentium D 930.  And the stock E6700 power draw under load is lower than the power draw of an AM2 X2 5000+, which it thrashes in every single benchmark performance test.  Wow.