Power, Heat, And Efficiency
AVADirect’s Mini Gaming PC leverages the Haswell CPU architecture to turn less energy into heat, but so does our own ASRock M8-based build. Its GeForce GTX 780 graphics card also pulls around 100 W more than the 760 in our barebones M8.
Both the baseline M8 and factory-overclocked AVADirect configurations push Intel’s Core i7-4770K to its thermal throttling point. The overclocked M8 was fixed by reversing two of its fans, but the system was always far noisier than AVADirect’s Mini Gaming PC.
Using the average of all systems as a baseline, the comparison of power to performance shows that AVADirect’s machine produced 5.8% better-than-average performance using 17.8% less-than-average energy, for a 28.8% above-average efficiency rating.