Power Consumption
Under load the Intel H55 motherboards all produced similar results, consuming around 135-139 watts of power. At idle things varied a bit more, with the ECS H55H-CM consuming just 83 watts and the Asrock H55M Pro requiring 96 watts.
When compared to the AMD Athlon II X4 635 processor, the Core i3 540 uses only slightly less power at idle, while under load it consumes considerably less. The Core i7 750 which works at a lower clock speed and does not feature an onboard GPU consumes much less power at idle, but its quad-core design requires considerably more juice when under load.