Power Consumption

In conclusion we tested the power consumption of two Zotac ION-ITX mainboards equipped with single and dual-core Atom processors. According to the results of our previous tests, the performance of these two solutions doesn’t differ too much, so we hope that the same will be true for their electrical readings.

The following numbers show the total power consumption of the tested platforms (without the monitor). During our tests we used LinX 0.6.4 utility to load the CPUs and FureMark 1.8.0.

I can’t say that using a dual-core processor instead of a single-core one can seriously affect the power consumption of the ION based system. Atom is a very energy-efficient processor which was one more time confirmed during our test session. The major contribution into the system ION based power consumption comes from the chipset, which 12 V TDP is 1.5 times higher than that of a dual-core Atom. As a result, we once again arrive at the conclusion that the similarity between Zotac ION-ITX-A and Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboards is much more serious from the practical standpoint, than we have expected it in the beginning.