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Desktop PC components get rated for power efficiency, Intel rules the roost
With all the antitrust noise, threats to AMD, and conflicts with NVIDIA, it's hard to feel too charmed with Intel at the moment. But, if you're looking for the best combination of performance and power consumption possible, you'll have to swallow any animosity and put an Intel inside, with an efficiency piece at bit-tech.net finding that chips from that manufacturer were, on average, considerably more efficient than their AMD counterparts. That's just part of the story, the site testing everything from memory to power supplies and finding the best compromise of performance and efficiency. It's perhaps no surprise that high-efficiency PSUs trump older, hotter ones, but you might not expect to learn that desktop SSDs offer barely any improvement over their 5,400RPM platter-based brethren. Follow the article's advice and you can shed 104 watts without losing a single 3DMark point -- though you may shed quite a few dollars in the process.
