Power, Heat, And Efficiency
The 27" XPS One's display is amazingly efficient, with a 16 W delta between it turned off completely and running at maximum brightness. That helps this platform achieve a similarly-amazing 53 W idle power consumption result, which includes a desktop CPU, a mobile GPU, and the monitor. Incidentally, this also forced us to add monitor power to the consumption results of our System Builder Marathon setups.
The Clevo notebook uses far less power, but also has a less-potent CPU and a far smaller screen.
The 27" XPS One runs really hot due to its fan profile that favors pleasant acoustics over comfortable thermals. We could have forced the fan to ramp up a little sooner at higher ambient temperatures, though. Doing so would have taken those temperature results down at the expense of more fan noise.
Unfortunately, low-end graphics performance hurts the XPS One's efficiency rating compared to the gaming notebook, which wields better gaming performance at lower power use. If we factor out the graphics portion of our overall performance evaluation, minimizing the emphasis on gaming, we can point to a larger display and a more powerful CPU for the -17% delta that remains.
