Intel Core i7-980X Six-Core Processor Extreme Edition Review

Power Consumption

Since power consumption is a big deal these days, we ran some simple
power consumption tests on our test beds. 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, POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 35a was run on all cores to make sure each and every processor
was at 100% load.

Results: The Intel Core i7-980X desktop processor Extreme Edition does very well in power consumption testing due to the fact that the processor is based on the new 32nm manufacturing process. The Intel Core i7-975 processor uses the older 45nm manufacturing process and uses slightly more power at both idle and load. That means that the Intel Core i7-980X processor not only is faster in the majority of the benchmarks, but it also consumes less power. At full load we found the Core i7-980X to be 50% faster than the Core i7-975 and here we see at full load the Core i7-980X uses 9% less power! It’s not too often you see a jump in performance like this and get a power reduction to top it all off!