Time To Upgrade: Should You Dump Your 2007 PC?

Benchmark Results: Power Consumption

We used the same 750 W PC Power and Cooling power supply for both systems, which makes the differences even more significant. The 2010 system requires roughly half of the 2007 machine's idle power. Most power savings can be found on the processor side, but the graphics card and the motherboard also contribute significantly.

The difference in peak power is equally impressive. The 2010 system with the Core i7-870 requires less than 199 W at peak load (CPU load only), which is 70% of the Core 2 Extreme’s power consumption. In other words, you get much improved performance for less power. This should have quite an impact on efficiency.