Power Consumption

We couldn’t disregard testing the power consumption of the Pentium D 820 processor, of course. It was the low TDP Intel set for this processor that stimulated our interest to this parameter. If the power consumption (and, consequently, the heat dissipation) of this CPU is not that high, it will be even more attractive for the users.

The diagrams below show the results of power consumption measurements for the Pentium D 820, Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 CPUs offered at the same price point today. We used the special S&M utility to load the CPUs to their maximum for a more illustrative picture. You can download this utility here.

Since Pentium 4 processors participating in this test support C1E technology, their working frequency drops down to 2.8GHz in idle mode. That is why the dual-core Pentium D 820 processor working at the same frequency under any workload consumes a little bit more power than its single-core fellows. However, the power consumption of the Pentium D 820 processor in idle mode is just a little bit higher than that of the Pentium 4.

As for Athlon 64, it is a few times less power-hungry here. And the remarkable thing is that we tested it with Cool’n’Quiet disabled!

Even under the maximum workload Athlon 64 CPUs (we tested those on Venice core) also boast considerably lower power consumption. You may consider it funny but the Athlon 64 processors under maximum workload consume about the same amount of power as the Pentium 4 processors in idle mode. This is something to think about, don’t you agree?

As for the power consumption of our today’s hero, Pentium D 820, it eats up about the same amount of power as the Pentium 4 processors from the same price group working at 3.0-3.4GHz. By the way, these processors?TDP is set at 84W, so it looks like Intel set the 95W barrier for its Pentium D 820 just in case.