Power And Temperature Benchmarks
When we measure power, we find that the new machine uses notably less juice under load than last quarter's configuration. Naturally, there's going to be some variance in the CPU and GPUs used on both systems. But remember also that we're using a different motherboard, installing less memory, and leaving out the SSD from today's build. At the very least, that should reflect well in the Day Four efficiency comparison that Thomas will write.
Both builds generate similar temperatures. The Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 performs a bit better than the reference-based model we previously tested. But what this chart doesn’t show is just how much quieter Sapphire's card is under load.
The bundled cooler Intel pairs with its Core i5-2400 isn’t as efficient as the previous system's Arctic Cooling Hyper TX2. However, our thermal measurements are still acceptable, and we don’t think anything beefier is necessary, particularly when you take into account this CPU's meager overclocking headroom.
