System Builder Marathon, June 2012: $500 Gaming PC

Power Consumption And Temperatures

Power Consumption

We enabled power saving features on both rigs and deliberately chose not to override automatic controls. The benefit, of course, is that we enjoy lower temperatures, less heat dissipation, and a quieter fan. On the other hand, some folks argue in favor of turning power-saving features off to maximize performance.

The current build’s 50.2 W power consumption at idle and 77.6 W under full CPU load is quite amazing. Less impressive are the power results when we apply a full 3DMark 11 load to the graphics subsystem.

Temperatures

While the performance of Intel’s retail boxed heat sinks isn't impressive, they both delivered adequate cooling at stock frequencies, operating quietly at the same time.

GPU temperatures may look high, but we had cooling to spare in both systems. Even overclocked, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti’s fan peaked at 54%, while the Radeon HD 6950’s duty cycle never broke 39%.