Dell Studio Hybrid Small Form Factor Desktop
Power Consumption
Before we bring this article to a close, we'd like to cover an important datapoint for the feature product we're testing here. Dell's Studio Hybrid small form-factor desktop is engineered to provide all the basic functionalities of a business-class desktop or Home Theater PC, in a very low power envelope. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power each of our test systems were consuming using a power meter between it and the wall plug. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration consumed while idling and under a heavy workload.
|
|
|
Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here and the test is representative of an entire system's consumption, minus the keyboard, mouse and monitor.
If you recall from our test system specs list, the Athlon 64 X2 and Core 2 Duo E6600 systems have discrete graphics cards (GeForce 8800 GTX), 10K RPM desktop hard drives, and either DDR3-1333 or DDR2-1066 system memory. In addition the full sized desktop test systems also have full power desktop dual-core processors under their hoods as well. Again, with the Studio Hybrid's low power, notebook-based components and architecture, it consumes dramatically less power than these standard desktop systems. As you'll recall, the full sized systems have some advantages in disk performance and in addition, have high powered 3D graphics engines, so they can do more with respect to high end gaming, that's for sure. However, at less than half the power of mid-range desktop, the Hybrid's performance-per-watt value proposition is pretty impressive.
