Maxit Mag

 

Continuing it's recently inaugurated new methodology for measuring PC power consumption, Tom's Hardware takes, this time, the most relevant Intel processors of the past few years to see just how well this so much marketed characteristic has evolved.

We all know that a Core 2 Duo (or a Core 2 Quad, for that matter) is much faster than a Pentium 4 or a Pentium D. We also know the data regarding it's power consumption, which is way better than that of the Netburst architecture, both at idle and under load. But, how do they fare under normal working conditions?

With the same motherboard, an Asus P5E3 Deluxe (X38), and two modules of 1 GB Crucial DDR3-1066 (CL 7-7-7-20 2T), they compare as much as four Intel processors: a Core 2 Duo E6850, a Core 2 Extreme QX6850, a Pentium D 830 amd a Pentium 4 630. All of them have a working frequency of 3 GHz, and while it was obvious that the single core 630 would be the worse one, it's quite noticeable the bad performance per wat the Pentium D shows here (only a 4% efficiency increase over the Pentium 4). The Core 2 Duo is more than 400% more efficient, and wins followed by the Quad (which losses a little bit of efficiency because of the two-dies-in-a-package desing).

Link: Tom's Hardware.