Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home	.	.
Prices: Mainboards ABIT ASUS Chaintech Shuttle Soyo Tyan CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ Search Prices:

LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: A new Platform Quad-FX Idiosyncrasies The Motherboard Test Config, Benchmark Overview Memory Performance The 64-bit Question Idle Power by OS Max Power Render Power (Cinebench) trueSpace POV-Ray Media Encoding 3DMark'06 F.E.A.R., DOOM3 FarCry 1.4 COD2, Prey Final Words Give Us Some Feedback on this Review
AMD's Quad FX Platform What's in a 4x4?
(Author: MS, January 21, 2007)

Windows Idle Power

Every computer spends a lot if time at idle and idle power consumption is therefore a major part of the overall power equation. As we have shown on the last page, the correct C'nQ drivers play a major role on this platform in the way of how the ACPI settings are executed, so how much of that translates into actual power consumption on the CPU level?

You might have guessed it, it is what's called a sh*tload of a difference. In Windows XP-32 without C'nQ enabled, the processors alone draw some 190W of power, which is dramatically reduced to 61W if Windows Vista-64 is used as Operating system. The Vista-64 (and XP-32+C'nQ) numbers are straight in line with what one would expect from a 3.0 GHz CPU, that is, approximately 30W at idle per CPU over two cores. Keep in mind here that the full-size cache in this case plays an important role in the power profile as we have shown in a number of earlier articles.

next page: => More Powerplay =>