Power Consumption

In order to test power consumption of our platforms we measured the wall power draw of the respective setup in both idle at the desktop and while playing back a demanding scene of the Batman: The Dark Knight Blu-Ray disc using PowerDVD 9 Ultra with GPU acceleration active at 1920x1200.



As you can see, the differences are surprisingly small and do not suggest one platform over another in my opinion. A difference of 10-15W is not significant enough to warrant the purchase of more expensive hardware or even switch out one platform for another on an existing setup. Only NVIDIA's ION does marginally better but there are numerous other arguments against it like its limited CPU performance.

I believe that if Intel had left their GPU's power saving features enabled, there could be a definite boost in this benchmark that would position the Clarkdale setup better. But as it looks right now, the power saving features are reserved for Intel's Mobile parts.