Intel Pentium G850 Sandy Bridge 2.9GHz CPU 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 3DMark Vantage the performance preset and took the maximum
power consumption during the first GPU test. We also tested a video
transcode using HandBrake 0.95 to see how the power draw on that was.

Benchmark Results: We expected the Intel Pentium G620 and G850 to be nearly identical on power conumption as both are 65W TDP processors and share the same core design and idle clock speeds. We found exactly that in our power tests and even saw that the Intel Pentium G850 was more power efficient than the Intel Pentium G620 that is 300MHz slower. No two chips are the same and the efficiency of the processor varies due to their location on the wafer when they were produced. Some areas on the wafer have more leakage than others and that is why no two processors have the same temperatures as well. The Intel Pentium G850 was likely screened with tighter tolerances and just happened to have less leakage on a transistor or gate level than the G620 that we have. It’s also safe to assume that the Intel Pentium G620 was fallout that didn’t pass the testing to become an Intel Pentium G850 processor!