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 to give us 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 power consumption tests we re-enable everything in order to get a real-world power draw. The power draw is measured via a power meter at the wall, so the numbers below represent the total system power draw from the mains, not the power consumption of a CPU itself. Measuring the power draw of any individual component in a PC is tricky to impossible to achieve.

Idle Power Consumption

For this test, we leave the PC doing nothing but displaying the Windows 7 desktop (with Aero enabled) for a few minutes and record the wattage drawn from the wall via a power meter.



Note: the Intel LGA1156 CPUs were tested in a micro-ATX board. This difference can account for up to 20W, as we found in our Energy Efficient Hardware feature.

Read our Performance Analysis.