Power And Efficiency
The $1000 PC in our most recent System Builder Marathon was a true miser by performance system standards, while the overclocked $2000 system was a hog. The alternative $2000 configuration had more overall performance, but will it also consume even more power than the pig it tries to replace?
We know that a pair of GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards will always pull more power than a pair of GeForce GTX 460s, so the only way to get a clue about CPU power differences is to look at both idle and full load power. Doing so gives us the impression that the Core i7-970 is about as power-hungry as the Phenom II X6 1055T at stock settings.
Yet, the AMD system required far more voltage to reach the same 4.0 GHz clock, so its overclocked configuration gets one mark against it. Score a second demerit for excessive power consumption in our former $2000 builds’s graphics cards.
A 78% performance gain against the baseline system puts the new build in a far better light than the one it replaces.
It’s nice to see the new $2000 PC in the same efficiency class as the $1000 build, even if it never quite matches it.
