Intel Core i7-3820 3.6GHz Processor Review

Total System Power Consumption

Since power consumption is a big deal these days, we ran some simple
power consumption tests on our test beds. The systems ran with identical
power supplies, Solid-Sate Drives, Memory kits and motherboards from
the same company. To measure idle usage, we ran the system at idle for
one hour on the desktop with no screen saver and took the measurement.
For load measurements, Prime95’s in-place large FFT’s were run on all
cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load for maximum
power consumption and heat. Curious about other test scenarios, we
decided to HAWX 2 the PC game for testing. We also tested a video
transcode using HandBrake 0.95 to see how the power draw was on that.

Benchmark Results: The Intel Core i7-3820 Sandy Bridge-E platform used significantly less power than the Core i7-3960X platform in load situations. For example, in Prime 95 it used 94 Watts less power! The Core i7-3820 was slightly faster than the Core i7-2700K in most of the benchmarks and here you can see that it also uses a little more power across the board as well. The idle power numbers for the entire LGA2011 platform with the Core i7-3820 was 57 Watts, on average.