Intel Core 2 Chipset Power Consumption Shootout

Since the introduction of Intel’s 90nm Prescott core, power consumption has been at the forefront of any CPU related discussion. But as both AMD and Intel strive towards introducing more power efficient cores we must turn our attention elsewhere to find new areas where power savings are necessary. The GPU is next on the chopping block for power consumption, but we’ve still got a little time before both ATI and NVIDIA unveil their new high DirectX 10 parts fully equipped with very high power consumption. While we wait for the next-generation of powerful GPUs and quad-core CPUs to debut, we decided to take a look at the power consumption of an often overlooked component in the system: the chipset.

We picked the three most popular mainstream Core 2 chipsets currently available for this comparison: Intel’s P965, Intel’s 975X and NVIDIA’s nForce 570 SLI Intel Edition.

AnandTech