System Power Consumption

With these results it's safe to say any 32nm processor that features 2.27 billion transistors is going to be a power hungry sucker. Under full load the Core i7-3960X will increase system consumption levels to a little over 250 watts, making it about as power hungry as AMD's FX-8150.

When left to idle the Intel power saving features only got us down to 104 watts, which is also roughly the same amount of power consumed by the AMD FX-8xxx series. Still, when compared to LGA1366 processors like the Core i7-920 and Core i7-965 EE, the new Core i7-3960X appears quite fuel efficient.

Against the original Sandy Bridge chips though, the Core i7-3960X consumes over 50% more power under load, and over 35% when idle.

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