Power Consumption And Max. Temperature
Our six processors fall within five watts of each other at idle—last-generation’s Core i7-2700K interestingly the second-place finisher.
Intel admits that it didn’t do much of anything to cut Ivy Bridge’s power consumption beyond its adoption of 22 nm lithography. It’s not surprising, then, that idle power use doesn’t really change compared to last generation.
Under load, however, the story is drastically different. A 10-minute Linkpack workload reveals 155 W maximum power consumption from our Core i7-2700K compared to 138 W on the Core i7-3770K. Incidentally, that’s just 1 W off from the 18 W separating Sandy Bridge’s 95 W TDP and Ivy Bridge’s 77 W ceiling.
Past explorations of overclocking show that tuning clock rate and upping voltage affect Ivy Bridge’s temperature much faster than Sandy Bridge’s. At stock settings, though, the difference isn’t as pronounced. And this is with the boxed cooler, too (not a big aftermarket model that’d dissipate heat more effectively).