Power Consumption

I performed the power consumption test with a multifunctional Zalman ZM-MFC2 panel. This panel measures the overall power draw of the computer (without the monitor) rather than of a single component. There were two test modes: 2D (Word and Web surfing) and 3D (a double run of the DM-ShangriLa demo from Unreal Tournament 3 at 1920x1200 with 8x FSAA and 16x anisotropic filtering). I chose Unreal Tournament 3 because it can utilize all of the CPU’s four physical cores, which is not a typical capability of 3D games as yet. Here are the results:

It turns out that platforms with a GeForce GTX 295 consume about 80W more under load than the same platforms with a GeForce GTX 285. Comparing platforms with different CPUs (and mainboards and memory), the Core i7 920 consumes about 40W more than the Core 2 Quad QX9650 at the default frequency as well as at 4GHz. The difference is smaller in 2D mode but the newer platform still has higher power consumption.