Power Consumption

For all of the overclocked performance tests, we disable all power-saving technology in order to give us a consistent set of results and also best-case performance numbers - even though technologies such as Intel's SpeedStep might only take microseconds to kick in, that can make a difference in some tests.

However, for the stock speed results and power consumption tests, we re-enable everything in order to get a more real-world power draw. The power draw is measured via a power meter at the wall, so the numbers below are of total system power draw from the mains, not the power consumption of a CPU itself.

We use Prime95's small FFTs test (with AVX instructions disabled) to put the CPU under 100 percent load, while idle power results are taken with the PC sitting at the WIndows desktop.