Tom's Hardware has dedicated an article to place the impact of the CPU, on the overall system power consumption, into a new perspective. They consider that if a system is noticeably faster than another one, it will complete tasks much quicker, so it will go back to its low-power idle state faster, requiring less power than a similarly efficient (slower) computer. This is a different approach to most reviews that deal with this issue, and one worth taking a look at.

The processors to be tested are known to be somewhat energy efficient: an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400. SYSmark 2007 Preview is used to simulate typical user behavior, and to get an idea about maximum power consumption levels, 3DMark06 and PCMark05 are looped four times.

After running the SYSmark test for more than an hour, the difference in average power consumption was 26%, but the difference in total power required to complete the entire benchmark was 50%. That can be easily explained by the fact that the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ system took 14 minutes longer to complete the benchmark, while the Intel system was running idle during this time.

The test with 3DMark06 and PCMark05 gave a consumption of 339 Wh for the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and 269 Wh for the Core 2 Duo E6400. The Intel system took 2:15 to complete this test, while the AMD system required less than 2:20, a small difference that pointed average power consumption as guilty for the total power consumption difference.

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