Core i7 - power at idle

[sphinx99]

There's no question how powerful and how power-efficient the i7 is under load. However what seems like a fairly high idle draw in most reviews I've seen keeps me from jumping in. Has anyone looked into options for reducing power draw on the i7 when idle?

I noticed from wikipedia,

"Sophisticated power management can place an unused core in a zero-power mode."

Does this sort of feature even work in an OS like Vista which might have all sorts of low load processes that jump from processor to processor? Does W7 offer anything up to get power utilization down for these multi-core monsters?

 

[sphinx99]

Hmm, I'm having trouble reconciling:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-Core-i7-Nehalem,2057-10.html

versus

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-phenom-ii,2119-9.html

What am I missing? The first link shows, IMO, reasonable power draw numbers. The second shows an OC system drawing more power at idle than the stock system does at full load from the first link.

 

[JaguarSKX]

Easy.

If you bothered to compare the test configuration you will note that the stock speed i7 920 (2.66GHz) was tested with a GTX 280 which draws 178w under load. The OC'ed i7 920 (3.8GHz) has a HD 4870 X2 which draws 264w under load. Everything else is more or less the same.

Wattage difference between both test PC = 207w
Wattage difference between the GPUs = 86w
Estimated wattage increase due to overclock = 121w (OC'ed by 1.14GHz)

 

[guney]

Most current (at least) high-end motherboards come with features that support fairly sophisticated power management and throttling feature (subject to what the supported CPU is capable of, naturally). These play well with Windows. However, it's fairly typical for these power management features to be disabled when you start using manual clock settings for overclocking. Few motherboard power management systems would remain active under overclocking.

 

[Erik in sac]

just browsing this site, I have everest running on my G13 lcd panel. It is showing 10.08 watts. Not scientific by any means, but its not a huge power draw.