Is Your PC Ready for a System Update?

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Power Consumption Test Results

Clearly, the base system requires the least idle power and the $350 and $500 upgrades increase the system power consumption across the board. It is, however, interesting to see that the 90 nm dual core 4200+ processor doesn't actually require much more than the single core 3500+ 130-nm processor. Also, the GeForce 8600 GTS is more powerful and more advanced than the Radeon X850XTX, but its power requirement isn't higher.

Hard Drive Performance

Patrick Schmid
Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.