Intel Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E CPU Review

Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we also monitored how much power our test systems consumed using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the processors alone.

The Core i7-4960X ended up consuming somewhat less power than the six-core Core i7-3960X under both idle and load conditions, but considerably more than the quad-core Core i7-4770K. The Core i7-4960X's idle and load power was also somewhat higher than the AMD FX-8350, but considering the massive performance increases offered by the Core i7-4960X, using a bit more power is easily justified. It may use more power at peak, but the Core i7-4960X is more efficient with that power than AMD’s fastest desktop processors available today.

As we mentioned earlier, overclocking the Core i7-4960X can result in large increases in power consumption. To demonstrate this, we also monitored power consumption with the chip running at its stock configuration and while overclocked to 4.6GHz. As you can see, power consumption jumped up almost 150 watts with the chip overclocked to 4.6GHz.