The CPU Articles
- AMD Phenom vs. Athlon Core Shootout
- Can Water push Yorkfield to 5 GHz?
- AMD: Survival and the Future
- Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770: UPDATE
- Phenom 9700, AMD's 1st Quad-Core CPU
- Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770: Paper Tiger?
- Overclocking: Dual- vs. Quad-Core CPUs
- Intel's 45 nm Penryn CPU: 4 GHz Air Cooled
- Does Cache Size Really Boost Performance?
- AMD's Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Black Edition
Forum
- Thoughts and questions regarding C2D Temperature Guide
- High-end and Luxury P45-GIGABYTE P45T EXTREME Air-Cooling 659MHz
- HOWTO: Overclock C2Q (Quads) and C2D (Duals) - Guide v1.6.1
- Best Chipset of 2008 so far?
- Why AMD is better than Intel?
- When will DDR3 actually be worth it?
- A 4.1 GHz Dual Core at $130 - Can it be True?
- Dead motherboard or Xeon E3110 processor or what?
- Asus P5E-VM HDMI - G35 video upscaling
- PCI-X motherboards (not PCI-E).
Test Setup
9:09 AM - December 28, 2007 by
Patrick Schmid
Source: Tom's Hardware US – Keywords: intel, cpu, power, consumption
Syndication:
Source: Tom's Hardware US – Keywords: intel, cpu, power, consumption
Syndication:
Table of Contents:
Test Setup
| Plattform | |
|---|---|
| CPU I | Intel Core 2 Duo E6850
65 nm; 3000 MHz, 4 MB L2 Cache |
| CPU II | Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850
65 nm; 3000 MHz, 8 MB L2 Cache |
| CPU III | Intel Pentium D 830
90 nm; 3000 MHz, 2 MB L2 Cache |
| CPU IV | Intel Pentium 4 630
90 nm; 3000 MHz, 2 MB L2 Cache |
| Motherboard I | Asus P5E3 Deluxe, Rev: 1.03
Chipset: Intel X38, BIOS 0402 (2007-09-19) |
| RAM | Crucial BL12864BA1608.8SFB
2x 1024 MB DDR3-1066 (CL 7-7-7-20 2T) |
| Hard Disk Drive | 1 Western Digital WD5000AAKS
500 GB, 7,200 RPM, 16 MB cache, SATA/300 |
| DVD-ROM | Samsung SH-S183 |
| Graphics Card | Gigabyte GV-RX385512H
GPU: Radeon HD 3850 (670 MHz) RAM: 512 MB GDDR3 (830 MHz) |
| Sound Card | Integrated |
| Power Supply | Coolermaster RS850-EMBA
ATX 12V 2.2, 850 W |
| System Software & Drivers | |
| OS | Windows XP Professional 5.10.2600, Service Pack 2 |
| DirectX Version | 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) |
| Platform Drivers Intel | Version 8.3.1.1009 |
| Graphics Drivers ATI | Catalyst 7.11 |
Benchmarks and Settings
| Benchmarks and Settings | |
|---|---|
| Sysmark 2007 Preview | Version 1.02
Official Run |






- Previous page Core 2 Extreme QX6850
- Next page Benchmark Results
The 'SYSmark Performance per Watt' can be misleading when comparing the dual and quad core processors, particularly when looking at other types of loads that make better use of the additional cores. In particular, look at x264 encoding, where a quad-core processor offers nearly double performance. See the graysky's articles on TechARP for actual charts and tables:
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=442
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=520
For a load that will use all processors, I believe that testing will show better performance per watt for a quad core compared to a dual (or even single) core because there is little or no additional overhead from the motherboard or powersupply or hard drives when adding an additional core.
It may be easier to understand this by comparing running 2 separate PCs with dual core CPUs in them vs. running a single PC with a quad core CPU. The quad core system won't need another motherboard, power supply, fans, drives, etc. so all those items are areas of power savings.
From the published tests above, the 2 extra cores consume 195-132=63 watts at max load and 94-77=17 watts at idle. That is in contrast to adding a 2nd system identical to the E6850 testbox which used 132 watts at max and 77 at idle.
A simplistic scaling using a spreadsheet, and assuming that performance doubles going from dual to quad cores (reasonable for x264 encodes), shows that:
state cores watts perf/watt perf perf/core perf ratio
Idle 2 77 1.46 112.42 56.21 1
Idle 4 94 2.391914894 224.84 56.21 1.638
Avg 2 90 1.46 131.4 65.7 1
Avg 4 112 2.346428571 262.8 65.7 1.607
Max 2 132 1.46 192.72 96.36 1
Max 4 195 1.976615385 385.44 96.36 1.354
In other words, using the system power numbers given, the quad core can be 35% to 64% more efficient than using a dual core, if given an appropriate load. A look at the Sysmark benchmark scores will show you that it did not scale up very much going from dual to quad.