Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we also monitored how much power our test systems consumed using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the processors alone.
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Total System Power Consumption
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Tested at the outlet
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We weren't surprised to see that the little MSI Impact board was so much more efficient than most of the field, but it was somewhat surprising to see how power efficient the three MSI boards were at idle. In fact, the Z87 G45-Gaming and Z87 MPOWER Max actually required less juice than the Impact, which is far less than any of the other boards we tested. There's closer parity in the amount of wattage each system pulled under load, though.
