Power Consumption

Power Consumption

In an IDLE state, a PC (Z97 / 4790K / 2x4GB memory / GeForce GTX 780 Ti / SSD) consumes roughly 65 Watts, remove the graphics card and run it from an IGP and that value will even lower itself.  Bear in mind that we measure the ENTIRE PC, not just the processor's power consumption. Your average PC can differ from our numbers if you add optical drives, HDDs, soundcards etc.

Now more interesting is to remove the graphics card and to see how it behaves then. In IDLE we measured ~64 Watts and, with processor load, 124 Watts for the entire PC. That is very low. Once we add voltage to overclock the dynamics obviously change. Idle results remain really good at roughly 76 Watts, however when we stress all four CPU cores the power draw (obviously) rises towards  give or take 230 Watt.

I want to make it very clear that power consumption measurements will differ per PC and setup. Your attached components use power but your motherboard can also have additional ICs installed like an audio controller, LUCID chips, network controllers, extra SATA controllers, extra USB controllers, and so on. These parts all consume power, so this is an indication. Next to that, we stress all CPU cores 100% and thus show a PEAK power consumption. Unless you transcode video with the right software your overall/average power consumption will be much lower.

Overall the temperatures remain on the high side as well, borderline acceptable - we are using Corsair H110 LCS cooling setup.