Power And Heat
Quad-core processors typically use less power than six-core models, and the systems in this comparison based on quad-core chips enjoy the additional advantage of leveraging newer architectures and more advanced manufacturing. But an extra graphics card affects the Chronos' average power consumption. The same issue affects our $2550 System Builder Marathon machine, which also stumbles under the draw of a six-core Sandy Bridge-E-based CPU. At least it serves as a sturdy space heater during cold winter benchmarking sessions.
We measured the thermal output of our dual-GPU configurations from the hotter card, though none of the boards exceeded the capabilities of their fan maps. The CPUs on the Origin PC and AVADirect boxes run surprisingly warm by liquid-cooling standards, particularly when the overclocked Lenovo machine pushes the heat of six cores into a similarly-sized radiator.