Power Consumption

Power Consumption

Here's where we'll slowly move into physically testing the processors and respective chipsets.

The new Ivy Bridge based processors are a bit of a redesign alright with the die-shrink, and as a result they are energy friendly processors with a 77W (for the enthusiast models) TDP. What you'll notice a lot is that in idle these things kick ass in matters of power consumption, whereas at peak TDP they behave quite normally.

In an IDLE state the PC (Z77 / 3770K / 8GB memory / GeForce GTX 580 / SSD) consumes 84 Watts. Bear in mind that we measure the ENTIRE PC, not just the processor's power consumption.

When we place load on the CPU and we see the power draw rise, the system now consumes roughly 160 Watts. This is with merely an SSD, memory and the GTX580 installed. Your average PC will draw a little more power if you add optical drives, HDDs, soundcards etc.

Overclocked power consumption remains really good at 240W @ 4900 MHz, we'll explain later.

Now if you are not planning to use a dedicated graphics card and will use the embedded IGP solely, then power consumption hauls ass. In IDLE we measured ~46 Watts and with processor load 113 Watts for the entire PC.

I want to make it very clear that power consumption measurements will differ per PC and setup. Your attached components use power but your motherboard can also have additional ICs installed like an audio controller, LUCID chips, network controllers, extra SATA controllers, extra USB controllers, and so on. These parts all consume power, so this is an indication.

Next to that, we stress all CPU cores 100% and thus show a PEAK power consumption. Unless you transcode video with the right software your overall/average power consumption will be much lower.