Overclocking Intel's Wolfdale E8000

Test Setup For Power Consumption Testing

Power Consumption Test Results

All power-consumption tests involved different CPUs running at 3.0 GHz.

Idle And Maximum System Power Requirements

This difference is significant; using Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.0 GHz) instead of Core 2 Duo E6850 (3.0 GHz) results in a 5.2% decrease in the idle-system power draw (73 W instead of 77 W) and an amazing 18.2 decrease in the system-power requirement under maximum load. Keep in mind that all other system components including the power supply, the motherboard, the graphics card, the hard drive and the memory stay the same! As you could see in the overclocking benchmarks and in the first part of the Core 2 Duo Wolfdale review, the E8000 series provides even better performance while saving a lot of energy.

Average Power Requirement During SYSmark 2007

Clearly, the 45 nm Wolfdale makes a huge difference; if you use it to replace a Core 2 Duo E6850 (65 nm), it will decrease the average power requirement of the test system from 90.3 to 80.8 W for the duration of an entire SYSmark 2007 Preview run. This results in a total decrease of 10.5% for the entire system. Again, keep in mind that we only changed the processor from 65 nm to 45 nm.