Power Consumption

For the power consumption tests we aim to gauge real-world power draw. The power draw is measured via a power meter at the wall, so the numbers below represent the total system power draw from the mains, not the power consumption of a CPU itself. Measuring the power draw of any individual component in a PC is tricky to impossible to achieve. We used Prime95 to fully load the CPU.

Idle Power Consumption

For this test, we leave the PC doing nothing but displaying the Windows 7 desktop (with Aero enabled) for a few minutes and record the wattage drawn from the wall via a power meter.

Load Power Consumption

To generate a realistic load power consumption figure we load the CPU using Prime95's small FFT test, which mimics 100 percent load across all logical and physical cores.


CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Results
Website: CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is similar to AS SSD in its use of incompressible data files, although it does use a different data pattern. We report the read and write results of the sequential and 4KB random tests



PCMark 8 Storage tests
Website: Futuremark

We've selected two benchmarks from PCMark 8's array of storage tests - the Battlefield 3 and Heavy Photoshop storage traces. These mimic real-world usage, for instance, loading a game and entering a save game or performing image editing. The final result is given in seconds.