Performance and Power Consumption in Nominal Mode

We decided to leave this “optimized” operational mode on for our ASRock X58 Extreme comparative performance tests, because this small speed increase was very unlikely to have a serious effect on the results. At this point we use the settings automatically set by the mainboard itself, and do not adjust anything. It is the exact mode that will be set when we select one of “Performance Defaults” parameters in “Smart Settings” sub-category of the BIOS. Besides, we are also familiar with a few other mainboards that slightly increase the nominal work frequencies without even asking and not only under workload, but at all times. Namely, a slight increase in the base frequency from 133 to 135 MHz in the nominal mode has always been the case on Gigabyte mainboards, such as Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme, which we chose to compete against ASRock X58 Extreme in our today’s test session.

As you can see, ASRock X58 Extreme doesn’t demonstrate an overwhelming superiority over the rival, but doesn’t fall behind it either. Both mainboards overall perform equally fast.

We measured the power consumption using Extech Power Analyzer 380803 device. This device was connected before the system PSU, i.e. it measured the power consumption of the entire system without the monitor, including the power losses that occur in the PSU itself. When we took the power readings in idle mode, the system was completely idle: there were even no requests sent to the hard drive at that time. We used LinX program to load the CPU. For more illustrative picture we created a graph showing the power consumption growth depending on the increase in CPU utilization as the number of active computational threads in LinX changed.

The efforts of ASRock engineers aimed at lowering their mainboard’s power consumption did pay off well. ASRock X58 Extreme consumed about the same amount of power as Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme mainboard, and the latter is one of the most energy-efficient LGA1366 mainboards we have tested so far. This way, in the nominal mode ASRock X58 Extreme performs just as good as its well-known competitor. However, the results of performance comparison during overclocking turned out completely different. But before we move on to the results, let’s discuss peculiarities of overclocking on ASRock X58 Extreme in detail.