Power Consumption & Overclocking

Power Consumption

The die shrink made its point in the power consumption figures, with the six-core Core i7-980X impressively modest in power draw despite its number of cores. At idle, it was about level with the Core i7-975 Extreme Edition and when we started loading the applications, the numbers did not jump as much as the 975. At its peak, we found the Core i7-980X to be on par with the slower Core i7 and even the Phenom II X4 965. Considering the price point of the new 980X versus the 975, there's not doubts which you should be selecting for your next ultimate rig.

Overclocking

The 32nm process also appeared to help in overclocking, as we doubt that Intel's new stock cooler, decent as it may, would have made such a big difference compared to our third-party cooler. In any case, the 980X reached almost 4.4GHz stable with air-cooling and in fact, it booted into Windows at more than 4.5GHz, though it failed the subsequent stability test.

The 32nm process shrink appears to have improved the overclocking capability of this Core i7 processor. This is a new high for us on this platform, easily beating the 3.9GHz we saw on the Core i7-975 Extreme Edition using the stock cooler.

While the higher clocks did not make a difference in Crysis (most likely due to the graphics card now being the bottleneck), we saw a 5% improvement in scores for World in Conflict and up to 15% in 3ds Max 8. For enthusiasts who enjoy the overclocking aspect, this is a big reason to shell out the premium for the Core i7-980X. For more gaming performance impact at such a high CPU speed, we'll explore that separately in a dedicated article with an even more powerful rig. For now, our testing and results are in-line with previous test hardware for proper comparison and backward compatibility purposes.