System Power Consumption

The idle power consumption of the 32nm Intel Core i7 2600K and Core i5 2500K processors is extremely low, especially considering that the above results are for the entire system, which includes a GeForce GTX 580. Under full load the Core i5 2500K system consumed 151w, 9% less than that of the Core i7 2600K.

The Core i7 2600K consumed 44% less power than the Core i7 975 Extreme Edition. Considering that we found the newer processor to be consistently faster, this is a truly impressive result for Intel.

Above are the power consumption results with the GeForce GTX 580 removed and the onboard graphics engines enabled. The Core i5 2500K and Core i5 655K consumed a similar amount of power at both idle and under full load.

The Core i5 2500K was significantly faster when measuring CPU and GPU performance all across, so this is another impressive achievement. The Core i7 2600K consumed 10% more power under load when compared to the Core i5 2500K, and given the performance boost this is justifiable.