Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550S: A New 65W Quad-Core

POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance

POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.

I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.

Performance under POV-Ray shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s been following the last few CPU articles here at AnandTech. The Core i7 dominates while the Phenom II is quite competitive with the quad-core Penryns. Let’s look at average power consumption:

On average, the Q9550S pulls 10 fewer watts than the Core 2 Quad Q9400, despite being 21% faster. Compared to the Q9650 the difference grows to 25W.

Peak power consumption is similarly svelte for the Q9550, we’re talking 161W at most for the entire system:

As impressive as the power numbers are however, once again we see that total energy consumed is actually lower on the Core i7 systems - by a lot.

The Core 2 Quad Q9550S used 17216J of energy during the POV-Ray test while the Core i7-920 used only 13876 joules. If you want a lower power bill, go for the i7.