Power Consumption and temperatures
Power Consumption and temperatures
The Core i7 processors have gotten a bit of a redesign and are relatively energy friendly processors, well... as long as you do not overclock them that is. Next to that, clever power management allows the internal voltages and processor multiplier to drop, core independent.
All Gulftown (6-core) based processors have a TDP of 130W, which is similar to the initial Bloomfield Core i7 quad-core series. This processor being a six-core processor, that's quite an improvement and it shows this during our measurements:
| Setup | Idle(Balanced) | Idle (High perf) | 100% CPU |
| Reference X58 + 980X | 139 | 150 | 272 |
| ASRock X58 Extreme3 | 980X | 129 | 134 | 256 |
| Rampage III Extreme | 980X | 139 | 150 | 272 |
| GBT X58A-UD9 | 980X | 112 | 131 | 229 |
| MSI Big Bang XPower |980X | 109 | 136 | 239 |
It is certainly surprising to see the differences in power consumption amongst the ODMs. IDLE Balanced is the OS configured in BALANCED energy mode, with Speedstep throttling down the processor. In IDLE we draw 112W, that's with one ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card installed, the GPU is in IDLE status. If we move the Windows 7 or Vista energy mode up to performance we see the wattage rise to 131W still in IDLE.
Once we STRESS the 6 cores we see a power draw of 229W (for the total PC, measured at wall socket). That's below reference actually. The Gigabyte UD9 has the best power consumption we have seen thus far.
Once we overclock to 4.5 GHz on all cores (we'll show you that in the next chapter) things get out of hand much quicker. For the best power consumption make sure you have BIOS features like EIST and C1E enabled and within Windows set your performance mode to balanced (allows the processor to clock down).
Processor Temperatures
Let's have a look at processor temperatures.
Temperatures are very good and under control. With an air cooler you can expect temps like these:
Temperatures Degrees Cidle
100% CPU load
X58A-UD9 / Core i7 980X
25
~43
Now before you say 'awesomeness on the temps duuuud' this test was conducted with a Noctua NH D14 heatpipe cooler, this is the best heatpipe cooling your money can get you at this very moment...
Of course results will vary with different motherboards and cooling solutions. 100% CPU load boils down to 6 cores / 12 threads 100% stressed with Prime 95, voltages are left at default, processor Turbo mode is enabled.
Overclocked temps of course will differ, but we'll show you that in a second. Overall these are normal values.
