Performance and Power Consumption during Overclocking

Let’s start the discussion of test results obtained during CPU overclocking on DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 mainboard with comparative performance charts. We are going to compare our today’s hero against Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme again. The first table is for the common behavior of the DFI mainboard, when the multiplier sometimes may increase up to 22, but stays at 20 under heavy load:

If we disregard the results of the memory subsystem tests, we will see approximate parity almost everywhere, except the benchmarks that can parallel the load well enough, such as Cinebench 10, Fritz Chess Benchmark, 3DMark Vantage CPU Tests, Custom PC Bench 2007. In these tests DFI mainboard normally falls behind by about 3.5-5%, although in Custom PC Bench 2007 Multitasking Test the gap increases to almost 7%.

Now let’s change the way the board reacts to overclocking by setting “Set VR Current Limit Max” parameter to “Enabled”. Now the multiplier will increase to 21 even under heavy load and there is some hope that DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 will catch up with its competitor.

And it did! Once again memory subsystem tests aside, DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 runs almost as fast as its competitor in resource-hungry applications. And now let’s see what price we had to pay for this parity. Let’s take a look at the power consumption charts showing how it increased depending on the load changes. Just like during the performance tests, DFI board will be tested in overclocked mode with two implementations of Intel Turbo Boost technology. Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme will be its competitor again.

Once again the results appeared very illustrative. In idle mode when the CPU utilization is minimal, the power consumption of both mainboards is almost the same, and after that they both go their separate ways. Gigabyte solution maintains average level of power consumption, while DFI mainboard appears more energy-efficient if we leave its default implementation of Intel Turbo Boost technology in place (orange line on the diagram). It is quite logical, since the CPU in this case works at lower frequency and with lower Vcore. Unfortunately, all these achievements are smoothed over by lower performance in heavy-duty multi-threaded applications, as we have just seen from our performance comparison. If we change the corresponding parameters of the DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 mainboard and it starts to increase the multiplier even under serious loads, the mainboards’ performance evens out, but only at the expense of higher power consumption of the DFI board (red line on the diagram).