Page 10 - Power Consumption and Conclusion

These readings were taken from our power monitoring chip on our motherboard. Intel SpeedStep were disabled for both processors; and if these readings were right then the E7200 would be actually ridiculously power efficient at idle. I thought I read a decimal place off, but apparently I didn't. I took a look at our affiliate reviews and it seems that the overall power consumption difference between the E7200 and an E6600 is roughly 20W, and if the CPU did make that much of a difference in terms of overall power consumption, then this could be true.

Under load, the E7200 used half as much power as the E6600 -- again, at 20W it's actually very impressive. Even when overclocked, the maximum power consumption of the E7200 was around 40W even when we bumped up the voltage to 1.45V. This thing is teh sweetness.

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The Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 is one heck of a processor. I mean, seriously, a 'budget user oriented' processor that performed better than the previous generation midrange processor that retailed for over $270 at launch time. The E7200 pretty much beat the E6600 across the board, combined with its excellent overclocking potential, low power consumption (Under the assumption that the readings were right, of course), and runs nice and cool before you run the voltage up too high, I can see the E7200 having a large market for home users looking for performance on a budget. However, for around $30 or so extra, you can bump to an E8200 which offers a full 6MB L2 cache, higher clock due to a higher FSB, hardware virtualization acceleration and the such, it's really up the consumer to ponder if that 25% or so price increase for around 5-10% performance and feature advantage. Either way, it's up to you, and it's no doubt that the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 is an awesome processor. Owning half a dozen Intel Core 2 CPUs at this point (Mostly retail box), they not only perform well at stock, but also overclocks like crazy. The E7200 is no exception.

Special thanks to Dan over at Intel for making this review possible.

APH:Renewal Award
Starting from April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for motherboards, RAM, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings reflected without the limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.

The Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 may be classified as 'budget oriented', but it offers incredible bang for the buck once overclocked -- and trust me, if you don't overclock it, you're just wasting it.

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Page Index
1. Introduction and Specifications
2. Intel E7200 Architecture; Test System
3. Benchmark: EVEREST CPU
4. Benchmark: EVEREST FPU
5. Benchmark: PCMark05
6. Benchmark: 3DMark06
7. Benchmark: Cinebench R10
8. Benchmark: SYSMark 2007
9. Benchmark: SuperPI 1M; Overclocking
10. Power Consumption and Conclusion