Power consumption is very important today, with people more aware of the rising costs of living. Adopting a more efficient computer will reduce the cost across a year. That said, someone running an overclocked, overvolted system will not be that concerned with power consumption.
We used a calibrated meter to measure the power at the wall. No monitors were factored into the readings. All systems included the same graphics card, memory configuration and hard drive population.
We measured wattage at the socket when running Cinebench R11.5 64 bit which loads all cores to 100% utilisation. The graphics card was inactive during the reading.
We also rated power drain in the last (combined) test of 3DMark 11 which puts a strain on both processor and graphics card – mirroring a real world gaming result.
Power consumption of the FX8350 is certainly not a strong point. When idle the system consumes 80 watts of power which isn't bad. When loaded with Cinebench R11.5 the power drain of the reference FX8350 system rises to 231 watts, which is 3 watts more than a Core i7 3770k when overvolted and overclocked to 4.8ghz.