Feature Articles

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550/Q9450 - 45nm Prevails

By Vijay Anand - 1 Apr 2008

Power Consumption

Power Consumption

Apart from the slightly better performance of the newer Penryn-based Core 2 Quad Q9550 and Q9450 processors than their 65nm counterparts, power efficiency has been the other big selling point. We were completely sold with the results when we first reviewed the QX9650 last year and we're glad to note that the Q9550 and Q9450 carry on the same tradition as you'll soon see below.


Idling in Windows Desktop

Using a power meter at the power outlet to collectively measure the entire system's power draw, the newcomers at idle save anywhere between 10 to 15% of the usual power draw on systems running a Kentsfield processor. That's a tidy amount of power savings from not doing anything and it's inline with what the QX9650 processor achieved.

3DMark06 CPU Test 2

The power savings figures start to get interesting once we start to load the system. In this 3DMark CPU testing routine, the CPU is heavily taxed, but the GPU isn't involved much. As it stands now, a Q9550 is able to achieve nearly 30% power savings as opposed to an old Core 2 Extreme QX6850 - both of which perform quite similarly in a number of benchmarks we've seen so far.

SPECviewperf 10 Full System Loading - Quad Run

From our various ongoing benchmarks day to day, we've identified that the quad-threaded 3dsmax viewset in SPECviewperf 10 to be one of the more taxing scenarios as it maximized all the CPU cores and quite a bit of the GPU as well. It is in fact more taxing than 3DMark06. In such a test scenario, we found that all the Penryn based processors managed an average of 15% power savings over the older Kentsfield 'counterparts'.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.