"There's no doubt about it, Intel's dual-core Xeons are their most power hungry Xeons to date," GamePC writes. "Even when idling, two dual-core Xeons consume nearly 400W of power at any given time, which is amazingly high, even by Intel's standards.
"AMD's competing dual-core Opteron processors
consume far less power, especially using AMD's PowerNow!
Technology. When this is enabled, Opteron power consumption
drops to roughly 160 to170W when idling.
To be fair, we could not get EIST to function with our new dual-core Xeons, which may help idle power consumption levels. However, their full-load levels are ghastly high.