
e-on’s Vue 8 turned out to be the best candidate for measuring system load power because it’s a nice, long workload, and it fully taxes each of these configurations.
We already knew the finishing order from our performance tests. Now we can add to that power use over time, thanks to our Extech logger.

As the line graph suggested, Intel’s Xeon E5-2687Ws average the highest power consumption in this workload (then again, we might have guessed that would be the case, given two CPUs with 150 W TDPs).
Surprisingly, the Xeon W5580s are the second-worst offenders. Remember that Intel switched to 32 nm manufacturing for its Xeon 5600 series, so even though those processors sport an additional two cores each, they’re able to outperform 5500s in threaded apps while using less power.
Naturally, a single Core i7-3960X offers the absolute lowest average power numbers, albeit with the worst performance.

Multiply the average power by the fraction of an hour each configuration took to finish its rendering task and you end up with energy use in Watt-hours.
High power use and mediocre performance really hurt the old Xeon 5500s here. In comparison, the 5600s are much more attractive (though they use marginally more energy than a single Core i7-3960X, which is slow but draws a lot less from the wall).
The real winners are Intel’s Xeon E5s, though. Despite averaging the highest power consumption, stellar performance under a full load translates to the lowest energy use.
- Xeon E5-2687W: Replacing The Best With Something Better
- Meet The Xeon E5s
- Intel C600 Chipset Family
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
- Benchmark Results: Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5
- Benchmark Results: Media/Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Rendering
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Percent Faster: Xeon E5s Vs. Xeon 5600s
- Power Consumption And Efficiency
- Xeon E5: Respectable Performance Boost, Bigger Efficiency Gain
I'd be really surprised to see these in gaming machines, even in the high end boutiques. That's a $2k processor they reviewed, and basically all it offers over the $1k SB-E chip (for gamers) is an extra pair of cores, which games can't make use of.
Anandtech benched those next to the new Xeons. Went about as well as Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/6
Mentioned on the test page--I've invited them to send hardware and they haven't moved on it yet.
Great article! I was not expecting my mind to be blown away today, and it was
I'd be really surprised to see these in gaming machines, even in the high end boutiques. That's a $2k processor they reviewed, and basically all it offers over the $1k SB-E chip (for gamers) is an extra pair of cores, which games can't make use of.
Anandtech benched those next to the new Xeons. Went about as well as Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/6
Mentioned on the test page--I've invited them to send hardware and they haven't moved on it yet.
I would guess that's because Interlagos is garbage compared to the new Xeons and they know it. I don't think they're terribly eager for the front page of Tom's Hardware to show the low end Xeon's beating the best Interlagos has to offer.
Sorry, vote me down all you like, but the title was just silly.
Not really my place to speculate--only to point out that I similarly wanted to see AMD hardware included and explain why it isn't there
No, the title is a fairly common phrase in American English.
"Now that I've got X, I can really do some damage" would probably be the way I hear it used most often.
Yeah, I understand that you're in a sensitive position. But being a lowly commenter, I'm free to speculate all I want!
Muahahahaha!
Precisely ;-)
In my opinion, the SolidWorks test is also one of those not representative of typical SolidWorks tasks. PhotoView only renders realistic images of a SolidWorks model. Personally, I think the Specviewperf SolidWorks test would be significantly more representative of average SolidWorks use.
Although I really hate to draw this comparison, PhotoView is more like using Power Point to organize a display of images created in Photoshop. In this comparison, most of the grunt work is done by Photoshop rather than Power Point, as is most of the grunt work done in SolidWorks then rendered in PhotoView. Performance differences revealed by the Specviewperf test are more informative, IMHO. See these.
we have to wait to long for that..
Reading this however, all I can do is think how PO'ed I am at Intel not enabling the 7th & 8th cores on the SB-E i7-3960X and i7-3930K.
I'm going to drop these into X79 and compare the numbers to see how power is affected. Maybe get a little overclocking out of them, just to check ;-)