Power, Heat, And Efficiency
When it comes to power-saving improvements, a smaller manufacturing process giveth, while an integrated USB 3.0 controller taketh away. Fortunately, because Z77 eliminates the Z68 platform's two on-board, third-party USB 3.0 controllers, it manages to achieve a 3-5 W advantage.
Both motherboards also present similar temperatures, though heat sink design has a greater influence than wattage on this chart.
Intel's Quick Sync nearly doubles our transcode performance, in turn boosting the average performance of this encoding suite by roughly 25%.
Lower power consumption gives the Z77 platform a statistically significant efficiency lead over Z68, though the difference on the power bill of a single user might not be noticeable.