Time To Upgrade: Should You Dump Your 2007 PC?

Benchmark Results: Efficiency

As seen in the individual benchmarks, performance almost doubled on average, so our efficiency testing suites terminates much earlier on the 2010 Core i7-870 machine.

Average power consumption differs quite a lot and comes closer to peak power in the Core i7-870 system's case. This is probably because of the Turbo Boost feature, which maximizes performance by requiring a bit more power.

The total power used to complete our workload is 52.4 Wh on the Core i7 2010 system versus 126.9 W on the Core 2 Extreme/Quad from 2007. This means that the new system terminates the workload significantly faster utilizing only 41% of the power.

This result is obvious. The new system provides a leap in performance per watt. We relate power consumption to the the time required for completing our workload in this index.

Again, we see less power consumption plus quicker processing on the 2010 Core i7-870 system.