AMD's 65nm Brisbane Core Previewed: The most energy efficient AMD CPU to date

Gaming Performance & Power Usage

By and large the biggest contributor to power consumption when running 3D games is going to be your graphics card, and in this case it's the 8800 GTX plugged into our test bed. That being said, there is still a fairly sizable difference between the CPUs in power consumption; we're simply dealing with much higher numbers than before thanks to the GPU running at full load.

Core 2 is significantly faster than the X2 in Quake 4, which we've seen in previous comparisons. We ran into a strange anomaly with gaming performance and our Brisbane chip; for some reason, in Quake 4 and Half Life 2, the 65nm 5000+ ended up being slightly slower than its 90nm counterpart. We're still waiting for an answer from AMD, but as far as we know there shouldn't be any performance differences between the two chips.

Power consumption is basically equal between the Brisbane 5000+ and the Core 2 Duo E6600, but given that the latter performs so much better Intel gets the overall win in power efficiency:

Switching games doesn't change the rankings at all, as Oblivion gives us a repeat of what we saw in Quake 4. Interestingly enough, we didn't see a performance difference between the 90nm and 65nm 5000+ offerings here like we did in Quake 4.