Re: Intel's e8800 is a nominally 3G part but everyone runs them at 3.6G and above - that is probably the target for the 3G Phenom II. According to a friend of mine who is an Intel-based gamer, the e8800 has better performance at 3.8G than the i7 965EE - he has both. Even with a big noisy cooler, the 965EE hits 90C after 30 minutes of play.
Well, you can thank gaming performance to the fact that very few games today are multithreaded, so you might as well use two cores and overclock them, as opposed to using 4 cores at a lower speed.
Of course, based on this logic, I am unsure as to why you are pumping Phenom II as the answer, since most 3rd parties have shown Nehalem to be very power efficient. In games, which are not multithreaded, Nehalem ends up dissipating far less power than the equivalent Core 2 Quad, while giving equal or better performance.
anandtech.com
AMD's 65nm Phenom was an absolute disaster in power consumption, but maybe they've improved a few things with 45nm. Still, I'd rather see the third party data than to rely on your anecdotal evidence. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I'd rather work with quantitative data at this point, and so far reviewers have been very hot on Nehalem and very cold on 65nm Phenom. AMD has a lot to prove with their next generation parts.
Here are some other reviewers who have tested power consumption:
tomshardware.com
matbe.com
techreport.com
hothardware.com
As you can see, if you are running max power utilities such as Prime95 to get the activity factor up, Core i7 dissipates a lot of power, but it still doesn't compare to the power of a Phenom based system. I look forward to Anandtech doing application power tests with the new Deneb processor to see how it compares. |
