
e-on’s Vue 8 turned out to be the best candidate for measuring system load power because it’s a nice, long workload, and it fully taxes each of these configurations.
We already knew the finishing order from our performance tests. Now we can add to that power use over time, thanks to our Extech logger.

As the line graph suggested, Intel’s Xeon E5-2687Ws average the highest power consumption in this workload (then again, we might have guessed that would be the case, given two CPUs with 150 W TDPs).
Surprisingly, the Xeon W5580s are the second-worst offenders. Remember that Intel switched to 32 nm manufacturing for its Xeon 5600 series, so even though those processors sport an additional two cores each, they’re able to outperform 5500s in threaded apps while using less power.
Naturally, a single Core i7-3960X offers the absolute lowest average power numbers, albeit with the worst performance.

Multiply the average power by the fraction of an hour each configuration took to finish its rendering task and you end up with energy use in Watt-hours.
High power use and mediocre performance really hurt the old Xeon 5500s here. In comparison, the 5600s are much more attractive (though they use marginally more energy than a single Core i7-3960X, which is slow but draws a lot less from the wall).
The real winners are Intel’s Xeon E5s, though. Despite averaging the highest power consumption, stellar performance under a full load translates to the lowest energy use.
- Xeon E5-2687W: Replacing The Best With Something Better
- Meet The Xeon E5s
- Intel C600 Chipset Family
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
- Benchmark Results: Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5
- Benchmark Results: Media/Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Rendering
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Percent Faster: Xeon E5s Vs. Xeon 5600s
- Power Consumption And Efficiency
- Xeon E5: Respectable Performance Boost, Bigger Efficiency Gain
Create a new thread in the UK Article comments forum about this subject
-
0 Hidemay1 , 7 March 2012 07:48Why is it that they never test out games on these CPUs... oh wait.
-
1 HidedevBunny , 7 March 2012 08:05When I saw the VS 2010:Google Chrome compilation showing on the graph as 10 seconds to compile I was getting ready to be really impressed ... until the text said 10 minutes. ;o)
-
1 Hidedavid801644 , 7 March 2012 15:48Yea, but how about the Quake frame rate?
-
1 HideDr_M0rph3us , 7 March 2012 19:11Great review - it covered almost everything related to real workstation workload. These CPUs offer a big performance increase over the previous XEON line, but I'd also wait to see the retail prices before starting building new architecture solutions using this platform.