Power consumption and efficiency
Our Extech 380803 power meter has the ability to log data, so we can capture power use over a span of time. The meter reads power use at the wall socket, so it incorporates power use from the entire system—the CPU, motherboard, memory, video card, hard drives, and anything else plugged into the power supply unit. (We plugged the computer monitor and speakers into a separate outlet, though.) We measured how each of our test systems used power during a roughly one-minute period, during which time we executed Cinebench's multithreaded rendering test. All of the systems had their power management features (such as SpeedStep and Cool'n'Quiet) enabled during these tests.

You'll notice that I've not included the Athlon 64 FX-72 here. That's because our "simulated" FX-72 CPUs are underclocked versions of faster processors, and we've not been able to get Cool'n'Quiet power-saving tech to work when CPU multiplier control is in use. I have included test results for genuine Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and 5600+ chips, though. I've also included our simulated Core 2 Duo E6600 and E6700, because SpeedStep works fine on the D975XBX2 motherboard alongside underclocking. The simulated processors' voltage may not be exactly the same as what you'd find on many retail E6600s and E6700s. However, voltage and power use can vary from one chip to the next, since Intel sets voltage individually on each chip at the factory.

The differences between the CPUs are immediately obvious by looking at these plots of the raw data. We can slice up the data in various ways in order to better understand them, though. We'll start with a look at idle power, taken from the trailing edge of our test period, after all CPUs have completed the render.

Our Core 2 Duo E6750 test system is at something of a disadvantage here, because its Asus P5K Deluxe motherboard appears to consume more power at idle (and presumably also under load) than the most 975X boards, including the Intel D975XBX2 board on which we tested the other Core 2 processors.

The E6750's idle power draw is also higher because of a limitation of the processor. Like most Core 2 processors, the E6750's minimum clock multiplier is 6X. In most Core 2 chips with a base FSB clock of 266MHz, that means the CPU's lowest speed when throttled via SpeedStep or C1E halt is 1.6GHz. In the E6750, the 6X multiplier works out to a minimum idle clock of 2GHz. The E6750's higher minimum clock will limit the effectiveness of power-saving schemes like SpeedStep.

Next, we can look at peak power draw by taking an average from the five-second span from 10 to 15 seconds into our test period, during which the processors were rendering.

The Core 2 Duo E6700's power draw jumps by 45W when going from idle to rendering. The E6750's delta between idle and load is only 27W—quite a bit less.

Another way to gauge power efficiency is to look at total energy use over our time span. This method takes into account power use both during the render and during the idle time. We can express the result in terms of watt-seconds, also known as joules.

The E6750 system's higher idle power draw hurts it here, as expected.

We can quantify efficiency even better by considering the amount of energy used to render the scene. Since the different systems completed the render at different speeds, we've isolated the render period for each system. We've chosen to identify the end of the render as the point where power use begins to drop from its steady peak. There seems to be some disk paging going on after that, but we don't want to include that more variable activity in our render period.

We've computed the amount of energy used by each system to render the scene. This method should account for both power use and, to some degree, performance, because shorter render times may lead to less energy consumption.

Even with the handicaps, the E6750 remains relatively efficient, well head of any dual-core Athlon 64 and miles apart from what may be its most direct competitor, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+.