Core i7-2600K Overclocked: Speed Meets Efficiency

Idle/Peak Power Consumption

This result is awesome! No matter which base clock speed we select, our test system would always require roughly the same idle power. Sixty-eight versus 70 W on the highly overclocked configuration is hardly a difference. This is particularly interesting as the slight voltage increase on the three fastest configurations does not seem to have any significant impact on system idle power.

Peak power increases much more significantly, which is not very surprising. Here we can see a more notable increase at the three fastest clock speeds, which is where we manually increased the processor voltage a bit. The question now is: how does the performance increase relate to the increase in power consumption? This is what defines power efficiency.