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 our Intel Core i7-5960X-based test system was consuming with a power meter, versus other test systems we used for benchmark comparisons on the previous pages. 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 of the CPUs alone.
 | | Total System Power Consumption | | Tested at the Outlet |
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Since it's packing more on-board features, we weren't surprised to see the Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5P consume slightly more power than the more streamlined X99-SOC Champion. If you're considering a Haswell-E based rig, we doubt a couple of watts here and there are going to matter to you, however.
What might be more interesting is what happens to power when you overclock a Haswell-E based processor like the Core i7-5960X we used for testing. The difference in power consumption between the stock CPU clock and when overclocked to 4.4GHz is approaching 200 watts. That's obviously a significant jump, so if you're contemplating a Haswell-E based system and want to do some overclocking, be sure to build in plenty of headroom and choose a nice, beefy power supply.
