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It's no secret that Intel has dialed up the power with Rocket Lake to compete with AMD's vastly more efficient chips, so you'll have to ignore the higher power consumption if you choose to go with an 11th-gen Intel chip. As such, there are no real surprises here — the Core i7-11700K draws more power in every measurement than the Ryzen 5000 lineup, and also more power than its 10th-gen predecessor, the Core i7-10700K.
As you can see in our renders-per-day measurements, Intel's Rocket Lake isn't in the same league as Ryzen 5000 in terms of efficiency, either. You'll have to turn a blind eye to the high power consumption if you choose a Rocket Lake processor.
Here we take a slightly different look at power consumption by calculating the cumulative amount of energy required to perform Blender and x264 and x265 HandBrake workloads, respectively. We plot this 'task energy' value in Kilojoules on the left side of the chart.
These workloads are comprised of a fixed amount of work, so we can plot the task energy against the time required to finish the job (bottom axis), thus generating a really useful power chart.
Bear in mind that faster compute times, and lower task energy requirements, are ideal. That means processors that fall the closest to the bottom left corner of the chart are best. That distinction still belongs to Ryzen.
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