Application Power Consumption

All power measurements on this page are based on a physical measurement of the voltage, current and power flowing through the 12-pin CPU power connector(s), which makes them "CPU only," not "full system." We're not using the software sensors inside the processor, as these can be quite inaccurate and will vary between manufacturers. All measurements are collected and processed at a rate of 30 data points per second, on a separate machine, so the power measurement does not affect the tested system in any way. Our new data processing pipeline allows us to link recorded data precisely with benchmark runs, so we can easily create the charts below.

Gaming Power Consumption

Energy Efficiency

Just looking at power draw in watts won't paint the whole picture for any given processor. It's not only important how much power is consumed, but also how quickly a task is completed—taking both into account results in "efficiency." Since a faster processor will complete a given workload quicker, the total amount of energy used might end up less than on a low-powered processor, which might draw less power, but will take longer to finish the test. In this section, we divide the performance achieved by the power usage, to get a Cinebench points per watt single-threaded and multi-threaded result. For gaming (with GeForce RTX 3080) we divide the average FPS of all our games by the power consumed, for a frames per watt rating. All these tests are based on our CPU-only power measurements, not whole system.