The Sandy Bridge Review: Intel Core i7-2600K, i5-2500K and Core i3-2100 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 3, 2011 12:01 AM ESTPower Consumption
Power consumption is very low thanks to core power gating and Intel's 32nm process. Also, when the integrated GPU is not in use it is completely power gated as to not waste any power either. The end result is lower power consumption than virtually any other platform out there under load.
I also measured power at the ATX12V connector to give you an idea of what actual CPU power consumption is like (excluding the motherboard, PSU loss, etc...):
| Processor | Idle | Load (Cinebench R11.5) |
| Intel Core i7 2600K @ 4.4GHz | 5W | 111W |
| Intel Core i7 2600K (3.4GHz) | 5W | 86W |
| AMD Phenom II X4 975 BE (3.6GHz) | 14W | 96W |
| AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (3.3GHz) | 20W | 109W |
| Intel Core i5 661 (3.33GHz) | 4W | 33W |
| Intel Core i7 880 (3.06GHz) | 3W | 106W |
Idle power is a strength of Intel's as the cores are fully power gated when idle resulting in these great single digit power levels. Under load, there's actually not too much difference between an i7 2600K and a 3.6GHz Phenom II (only 10W). There's obviously a big difference in performance however (7.45 vs. 4.23 for the Phenom II in Cinebench R11.5), thus giving Intel better performance per watt. The fact that AMD is able to add two more cores at only a 13W load and 300MHz frequency penalty is pretty impressive as well.
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dansus - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
Looking at the results of Quick Sync transcoding, the results are very interesting.But which h264 encoder is ArcSoft using, im guessing its Mainconcept, would like to compare QS with x264 to be sure of the results.
In future, be nice to see the original frame to compare with too. Without the original, comparing just the encoded frames means little.
7eventh - Sunday, February 20, 2011 - link
Looking at cbscores.com (using the actual Cinebench 11.5) the 2600K is not THAT glorious at rendring-speed ... Why did you use Cinebench 10?pshen7 - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 - link
Who in the world named it Sandy Bridge? And Cougar Point is no better. They need a better marketing department. Seriously.Peter Shen, Koowie.com
zzzxtreme - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
does that mean I can't install windows XP/DOS on UEFI motherboards?dwade123 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Intel i3 2100 is so underrated. It beats AMD's fastest's 6 core and older i7 Quadcores in many games and is only a little slower in other areas.Wouggie - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
With an even improved i7990 Extreme now out, with a base speed of 3.46 GHz, which would be the better choice, considering I am going to using a dedicated graphics card Nvidia Quadro 4000.Also. what do you see on the horizon for three channel motherboards with more than 2 SATA lll 6 Gb/s connectors?
georgevt - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - link
The benchmarks against the AMD processors are useless. All the compare is core-to-core performance (4 core to 4 core). You should be comparing is comparably priced processors/systems. For example, the 6-core AMD 1090T costs a hundred dollars less than the i7 2600 at newegg.com, yet your benchmarks fail to provide any comparative benchmarks. It's quite possible that for some applications, that the 6-core AMD may perform better than the more expensive i4-core 7 processors in your benchmarks.scurrier - Friday, April 1, 2011 - link
Anand says, "frequency domain (how often pixels of a certain color appear)," but this definition of the frequency domain is incorrect. Frequency domain in the case of video is a 2 dimensional discrete cosine transform of the frame. It is not a count of pixels like a histogram (binning) or anything.aka_Warlock - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link
Would be nice to see som test of how much of a performance difference lacking VT-d has on th CPU?AbdurRauf - Monday, May 2, 2011 - link
Does the QuickSync handle uprezing or only transcoding? Have you looked at the new WinFast HPVC1111 SpursEnginex4 and compared it to Quicksync, Cuda and Stream encoding and uprezing?