Power Consumption

For all of the 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.

For Core i7 CPUs we disable SpeedStep, C1E support, Intel C-State technology and Turbo Boost (despite this being a default performance enhancement technology, it can make benchmarks unreliable). We would normally disable HPET too, but the Asus P6T Deluxe doesn't offer this. For Socket AM3 CPUs, we disable Cool'n'Quiet, C1E support and HPET.

However, for the power consumption tests we re-enable everything but Intel's Turbo Boost in order to get a real-world power draw.

Idle Power Consumption

For this test, we leave the PC doing nothing but displaying the Windows Vista desktop (with Aero enabled) for a few minutes and record the wattage drawn from the wall via a power meter.

Full Load Power Consumption

For this test, we run the small FFT test of Prime95 (v25.9) across all available processing threads and record the wattage drawn from the wall via a power meter.


For analysis of these results, please read the Results Analysis page.