Application Power Consumption

All power measurements on this page are based on a physical measurement of the voltage, current and power flowing through the 8-pin EPS 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.

The ASUS Z890 Hero motherboard feeds four of the CPU VRM phases from the 24-pin ATX connector, instead of the 8-pins, which makes it impossible to measure CPU-only power with dedicated test equipment (we're not trusting any CPU software power sensors). You either lose some power because only the two 8-pin CPU connectors are measured, or you end up including power for the GPU, chips, and storage when measuring the two 8-pin connectors along with the 24-pin ATX. For this reason, we used an MSI Z890 Carbon motherboard exclusively for the power consumption tests in this review.

Gaming Power Consumption

Idle Power Usage

Idle power usage is important for assessing energy efficiency, too. It reveals the power consumed when the system isn't actively in use—which is often the case for many computers. Unlike our other measurements, which report "CPU power only," these results are measured at the wall socket (230 V AC). The system is configured as detailed in the Test Setup section, i.e. with one SSD and one discrete graphics card installed.

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 also 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 multithreaded result. For gaming (with GeForce RTX 4090) 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.