Table of contents
Power Consumption:
And now we come to the most interesting part. Intel claimed it had improved the power-saving on the CPU and yes, they did, with impressive results. While our board does not decrease the voltage of the CPU when overclocked in idle-mode, the Penryn does not care. It shuts as much down as possible, a quad-core is using less (!) power than compared to an overclocked dual-core E6700.
Under load the picture doesn't change one bit. The quad-core uses only as much energy as the the dual-core; this is really impressive. The full load graph is only an indication, because it's hard to get all four cores at full load. We used two cores for x264 encoding, while Super-Pi and 3DMark06 were allocated to the other two cores. It's unclear why Intel stated a 130W TDP, as the CPU not overclocked is capable of much less.
