Power Consumption

Power Consumption

In an IDLE state, a PC (Z87 / 4770K / 16GB memory / GeForce GTX 580 / SSD) consumes roughly 70~80 Watts. Bear in mind that we measure the ENTIRE PC, not just the processor's power consumption. When we place load on the CPU and we see the power draw rise, the system now consumes roughly 135 Watts. This is with merely an SSD, memory and a GeForce GTX 580 installed. Your average PC will draw a little more power if you add optical drives, HDDs, soundcards etc.

Now more interesting is to remove the graphics card and to see how it behaves then. As shown in the chart above only the embedded IGP is used, the power consumption is great. In IDLE we measured ~39 Watts and, with processor load, 104 Watts for the entire PC. That is very low.

I want to make it very clear that power consumption measurements will differ per PC and setup. Your attached components use power but your motherboard can also have additional ICs installed like an audio controller, LUCID chips, network controllers, extra SATA controllers, extra USB controllers, and so on. These parts all consume power, so this is an indication. Next to that, we stress all CPU cores 100% and thus show a PEAK power consumption. Unless you transcode video with the right software your overall/average power consumption will be much lower.

Overall normal temperatures, but we are using a heavy duty Noctua D14 cooler.