The IGP Chronicles Part 2: AMD 780G vs. Intel G45 vs. NVIDIA GeForce 8200

Power Consumption

The power consumption breakdown is as expected: Intel is in the lead thanks to its lower power 45nm process and if you decide to disable CnQ to get around the performance anomalies then the difference is even bigger.

There are a few items worth pointing out in the following results. First, remember that gaming power requirements will scale with the frame rates, so if you are GPU limited (which we are in all cases here) you won't use as much power from the CPU and other components. Taking that a step further, if you are limited to half (or one fourth) the frame rate, direct comparisons between competing solutions become rather meaningless - most people playing games would be more than happy to increase power use during games in order to achieve acceptable frame rates.

That said, games frequently don't let the CPU idle when they're waiting for the GPU, and you can clearly see in the gaming and video encoding benchmarks that the Phenom setup uses significantly more power than the Core 2 Quad. What we really need is for NVIDIA to make a good chipset for LGA-775....