Intel Core i7-980X Gulftown Six-Core 32nm Processor Review

Power Consumption / Temperature Testing

Power Consumption

For this section, every energy saving feature was enabled in the respective BIOSes and the Windows Vista power plan was changed from High Performance to Balanced.

For our idle test, we let the system idle for 15 minutes and measured the peak wattage through our UPM EM100 power meter.

For our CPU load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads for 15 minutes, measuring the peak wattage via the UPM EM100 power meter.

For our overall system load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads for 15 minutes, while simultaneously loading the GPU with OCCT v3.1.0 GPU:OCCT stress test at 1680x1050@60Hz in full screen mode.


Lately, Intel have been on a roll when it comes to lowering power consumption. Both Lynnfield and Clarkdale established new records when it comes to performance-per-watt in the consumer realm. With Gulftown, Intel sought to vastly increase overall multi-threaded performance while keeping the overall power consumption in the same realm as the previous Bloomfield chips.

As you can see, despite 50% more cores, and 50% more cache, the i7-980X has exactly the same power consumption as the i7-975. That's a testament to the new 32nm manufacturing process, but we definitely suspect that Intel have done a few other little improvements under the hood.

This is definitely the processor (or at least processor family, ie: Gulftown) that BOINC, WGC, and F@H bigadv crunchers have been waiting for.

Temperature Testing

For the temperature testing, we used both the stock Intel DBX-B CPU cooler and a Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme (TRUE). The system was left to idle for 15 minutes, and then we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs for 15 minutes. The ambient temperature was 23°C/73.4°F. Keep in mind that the thermal sensors in most modern processors is not really accurate at measuring idle temperatures, hence the very small delta between the room temp and the idle results.


Although every single chip exhibits unique thermal variances, we can tell you that our i7-980X ran a little cooler than our i7-975. These chips aren't fire-breathers by any means. The new DBX-B had some pretty solid cooling performance, but as we mentioned previously, we can't recommend that anyone use it in Performance mode since the fan makes a high pitched noise that drove us crazy. If you aren't noise sensitive, and if your system is in a proper case and away from you, it might be OK. Thankfully, performance in Quiet mode is not significantly worse and it is substantly quieter. Overall, we are pleased with both Gulftown's thermal output and the DBX-B's cooling performance.