Power Consumption And Efficiency
Our global wattage readings are taken at the power supply’s input, and some of that power is lost within the power supply itself. That means that all of today’s builds pull less than 400 W from the power supply, and any of these builds could have been made a little cheaper by using a less-capacious unit of similar quality.
SSDs typically draws less power than hard drives, so hardware similarities between the $1,000 and $800 machines should theoretically give the more expensive build a lower power signature. This isn't the case, though. So, the $1,000 machine’s excess power draw is probably due to its extra fan and higher memory voltage.
An SSD gives the $1,000 machine a huge boost in our storage-oriented metric. But that boost affects user experience more than program performance. Because of that, it represents only 10% of our total performance score.
The rest of our breakdown used to be: 30% games, 30% encoding, and 30% productivity. Changes to our benchmark suite now make the totals of 30% games, 15% creativity, 15% A/V encoding, 15% productivity, 15% compression, and 10% storage.
Using the slowest configuration as our baseline, we find this quarter's most-expensive machine on top of its efficiency curve by 6.2%. While overclocking can actually improve efficiency, overvoltage has the opposite effect. Each of our overclocked configurations loses this metric to the same system’s baseline operation.
