AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+: Competing with Aggressive Pricing
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 20, 2007 3:37 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Power Consumption
As always, we measured power consumption at two states: at idle sitting at the Vista desktop and under load while running our WME test. At both settings, Cool 'n Quiet/EIST were enabled to keep power consumption down to a minimum, although the biggest difference is made at idle.
Keep in mind that the X2 5000+ listed here is a 65nm Brisbane core, while the rest are 90nm parts. The X2 3800+ is a low power EE SFF core, although still based on AMD's 90nm process; all of the Intel CPUs are 65nm.
At idle, AMD's power consumption is lower than Intel by a few watts. Keep in mind that our E6300 is a particularly bad sample so it showcases the worst possible power consumption for that particular processor.
Under load it's clear that AMD needs 65nm to be competitive with Intel as only the 65nm X2 5000+ is able to draw power similar to that of its Intel counterparts. Note that AMD is at a bit of a disadvantage here as it's running on a more power hungry nForce 590 SLI chipset compared to Intel's P965, but the power requirements at 2.8GHz - 3.0GHz on AMD's 90nm process are quite real.
AMD needs 65nm top to bottom in a bad way; not only will it help ease capacity constraints, but it will also keep AMD from turning into the power hungry chip maker that Intel once was.
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hubajube - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
Wow, no shit? That IS easy.Rolphus - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link
You think that's easy...I've got 2.4GHz E6600 on an nForce 680i-based Asus P5N32ESLIWTF board (I forgot the model nubmer, can you tell?).
Last night as I was disabling the onboard audio, in the BIOS, I was curious so I went to the "extreme tweaker" menu, hit "AI Overclock", selected "20% overclock", and there you go - a 2.88GHz E6600.
The machine's fast enough to run everything I want at stock speeds, but who's going to complain about spending 15 seconds to bump the clock speed by 20%?
customcoms - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
I would like to point out that overclocking S939 and AM2 chips is equally easy-and probably why C2D overclocking has proven easy for many people-they started on the AMD chips when they were king and very overclockable (50-60% is not uncommon on the low end AMD chips).For example, my main rig is still an Opteron 165 (basically an X2 3800+ with twice the cache) clocked at 2.7ghz, no voltage change, stock cooling, raised FSB speed from 200 to 300mhz. Required MAYBE 5 bios boots total, all of which were concerned with ram stability (switched ram to 2x1gb at same time installed processor), which can be a pita with a DFI Ultra-D.
The difference between AMD and Intel when it comes to overclocking: highest possible speeds. C2D has A LOT of headroom, which means E6300 AND E6400's can usually reach >3ghz, topping out around 3.5ghz; E6600's can be pushed to 3.7ghz. X2 3800's commonly top out at 2.6gh. Stellar chips can be pushed to 3ghz (actually, good Opty's normally reach 2.8-3ghz, very few X2 3800's get there). No AMD cpu I've seen online has been pushed to 3.2ghz or greater on air. This means C2D is king for now, when we are talking about overclocking.
Neosis - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link
You are right about Conroe but actually single core AMD CPUs reached 3200 Mhz with air cooling. And some Opty 165-170-175s managed to exceed 3Ghz Barrier with low voltages. Here is an old thread about San Diego:http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...">http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...
neogodless - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
The whole time I was seeing how the X2 6000+ stacked up against the E6600, which would be the CPU I bought if I go with Intel. And suddenly I get to Power Consumption and it's mysteriously absent. I suppose I can try to extrapolate based on the other chips, but if you have data for it and accidentally omitted it, can you please add it in, for the sake of my laziness? Thanks!Imnotrichey - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
i found it interesting the 6700 consumes less power than its younger brothers. But wow, this article made a 6600 really look awesome
JarredWalton - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
Not sure why E6600 is missing on the power charts (perhaps Anand was running a downclocked E6700 for performance testing, which wouldn't be valid in power numbers), but it's pretty safe to say the E6600 would be right around the power draw of the other C2D chips - between the E6700 and E6400. Voltage settings also vary on the C2D CPUs IIRC, so you can get some CPUs that run at 1.1V and others that run at 1.3V, even though they're the same model number.jelifah - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
Is the author making a hint of 'things to come' when Barcelona arrives?A thinly veiled hint that AMD could actually compete? One can only hope. As was said repeatedly in the article, competition is the reason we have these prices and these processors. Without competition I doubt we would be seeing the performance, let alone the price, that we see today
hubajube - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
The X2 5600 does actually compete well with the E6600 and they're very close in price. Although, OCing is another story.goinginstyle - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
I was expecting to see another "just like me" article on this CPU and was surprised to see benchmarks under Vista and 64bit at that. Thanks for an interesting read and hopefully the motherboard editors will start using Vista in their articles now.I still think AMD is close enough in performance that it does not matter that much which platform you use. After all of the troubles I had with my 965 board I wonder why I switched now. Was there any reason why you did not use the nvidia 680i board for testing since the 590 board was used for the AMD system?