Benchmarks - power-draw
The under-load power-draw figure seems counter-intuitive at first glance. A slower chip with less cache shouldn't pull more juice than the Core i7 3960X. This graph summarises the inherent danger in testing engineering-sample chips provided by Intel, meaning CPUs have a range of operating voltages that differ from processor to processor.
Looking into it further, the 3930K ES chip's default operating voltage is a smidge higher than the also-ES 3960X on the ASUS Sabertooth X79 board, helping explain the above graph. Whatever the case, both Intel and AMD specify a range of voltages for retail parts, and a same-stepping Core i7 3930K is likely to draw similar power to the other SNB-E chip..
Taken a wider context and evaluated as a platform, the actual power-draw is pretty sharp for a genuinely high-performance processor that has server underpinnings.
