Intel Core 2 Chipset Power Consumption Shootout

The Test

We did our best to make this a chipset power consumption comparison, but in reality it is just as much of a motherboard power consumption shootout as a chipset one. All extra features -- things like Wireless LAN and IEEE-1394 support -- were disabled to level the playing field as much as possible between platforms. All memory timings and BIOS settings (where applicable) were set identically across all three systems, and of course we used the same physical CPU, power supply, memory and video card for each system to avoid any variation between components.

Our testing methodology was simple: we ran through our usual suite of CPU performance tests, varying only the motherboard, but also recorded power consumption for the duration of each benchmark (beginning when the benchmark starts measuring performance and concluding when it is done measuring performance). Using an Extech 380803 Power Analyzer we were able to log the instantaneous power consumption of our test systems every half a second, giving us reasonable accuracy, especially for the longer tests. For each benchmark that we ran, we plotted performance, total system power consumption and performance per watt.

We were able to run almost all of our tests while measuring power consumption with the exception of PC WorldBench 5, the reason being that some of the WorldBench tests were too short to get accurate power measurements with. We are working on a solution and hope to present WorldBench power consumption numbers in future articles.