Power Consumption

We measured the power consumption of our test systems running in the nominal as well as overclocked modes. We used Extech Power Analyzer 380803 device. This device is connected before the system PSU, i.e. it measures 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 Fritz Chess Benchmark to load the system and recorded the maximum reading in the end of the test after several runs.

As you see, the boards demonstrate comparable power consumption readings only in nominal mode. Asus is more power-efficient in idle mode, while Gigabyte – under load. However, during CPU overclocking everything changes. Asus loses quite a bit to Gigabyte in idle mode, but the difference is especially significant under load. There are several reasons for that: not functioning processor power-saving technologies, as well as overall higher voltages that were needed to achieve the same overclocking results as on Gigabyte mainboard. It is important to keep in mind that the obtained result is the maximum only for Asus P6T. Gigabyte mainboard allows to overclock the CPU even more.