We tested Blu-Ray playback with a Lite-On Drive and No Country For Old Men tested with PowerDVD 8. We've heard the G45 H.264 content has had issues and on our side it did not work with the CPU being maxed out and even some dropped frames in the very slow moving cinematography of the film. We couldn't "Print Screen" while PowerDVD 8 was playing so here is a screenshot of task manager with an E6420 after just quitting PowerDVD8 and playing back the film.

Testing the Gigabit Ethernet performance in Sandra it performed quite well at 68MB/s. USB performance was also excellent averaging 38MB/s read with Thermal right's external hard drive holder and an older Western Digital Raptor.

Now we'll take a look at power consumption in watts. Idle was taking after three minutes idle in Windows Vista desktop. Load was a combination of 3DMark and Valve's map creator benchmark.