Low-Power Face-Off: AMD's Athlon X2 Vs. Intel's Core 2 Duo

Average Power And Total Power Consumption (3DMark/PCMark Vantage)

Average Power Consumption

We tracked the total power consumption during 3DMark Vantage and PCMark Vantage runs, and calculated the average power that was required during the workloads. The results were similar. While PCMark requires more overall power, this is because of the integrated graphics units on the test systems. Were they replaced by powerful, discrete graphics cards, the CPU would no longer be the largest power consumer in the system.

Total Power Used

Since the Athlon 64 X2 5400+ BE required the most power, it was almost obvious that it would require the most power for 3DMark Vantage. The Intel dual-core processors are unmatched here. Keep in mind that the performance (frames per second) differed.

The PCMark Vantage results, which stress the processor quite a bit, don’t look good for AMD. Both the X2 5050e and the Athlon 64 X2 5400+ BE consumed much more energy than the Intel processors, including the quad-core CPUs. The 5400+ BE by AMD consumed almost twice the energy of the Core 2 Duo E7200 for this workload.