Intel Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E 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 on that was.

Benchmark Results: The Intel Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E processor had very impressive idle power consumption numbers at just 59.9 Watts on average. The previous generation Intel Core i7-990X Gulftown processor consumed 111 Watts at idle, so Intel has done a great job with idle power consumption on this CPU. Most PCs sit at idle anyway, so this is critical. At load the power jumped up, but had respectable power draws in gaming and video encoding testing. When running Prime 95 64-bit we saw the system hit 260 Watts of draw, which is the most of any processor on this application. The AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer processor still tops the charts with 286 Watts during gaming.