Before bringing this article to a close, we'd also like to talk a bit about power consumption. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power each of our Z77 Express-based test systems was consuming with a power meter, and compared them to the reference systems used throughout our benchmark tests.
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| Total System Power Consumption |
| Tested at the Outlet |
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Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling at the Windows desktop and while under a heavy CPU workload. Keep in mind, this is total system power consumption being measured at the outlet and not the the individual power consumption of the motherboards alone.
As you might expect from a gaming motherboard, the G1.Sniper3 is a little power-hungry, relatively speaking of course. At idle, it topped 100W regardless of the processor inside, which is significantly more than any other board in our chart. However, what’s apparent is that the Core i5-3470 is far more efficient, pulling the least amount of power of any other contender when under load. That’s just a 40W increase between its idle and load power requirements.
