Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz Ivy Bridge Processor Review

Total System Power Consumption

Since power consumption is a big deal these days, we ran some simple
power consumption tests on our test beds. The systems ran with identical
power supplies, Solid-Sate Drives, Memory kits and motherboards from
the same company. To measure idle usage, we ran the system at idle for
one hour on the desktop with no screen saver and took the measurement.
For load measurements, Prime95’s in-place large FFT’s were run on all
cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load for maximum
power consumption and heat. Curious about other test scenarios, we
decided to HAWX 2 the PC game for testing. We also tested a video
transcode using HandBrake 0.95 to see how the power draw was on that.

Benchmark Results: Power consumption with the Intel Core i7-3770K was a bit shocking to us. The load power consumption was amazing, but at idle it was 10 Watts higher than the Intel Core i7-2700K. This could be due to a BIOS issue or just that Ivy Bridge uses a little more at idle due to the new graphics engine.

Benchmark Results: With the discrete graphics card removed from the system we see the numbers drop big time, but the Intel Core i7-3770K still used more power at idle and during gaming than the Intel Core i7-2700K. On very CPU intensive tasks like Prime 95 and Handbrake the Intel Core i7-3770K was very impressive as it used 23% less power in HandBrake and 13% less in Prime 95!