Benchmarks: Power Consumption
The power consumption figures are an area of intrigue for the Supermicro C7Z97-M, with over 40W less consumption than competing boards. While some of this is likely down to the less aggressive stock CPU and memory frequencies, and a lower under-load voltage to boot, it could also point to the efficiency and quality of the components used.
As mentioned earlier on in the review the new BIOS, which improves the CPU and memory performance, causes the idle clock speed to be artificially elevated. The result is idle and load power consumption are both pushed up by about 25W to 35W.
