Performance and Power Consumption in Nominal Mode

If you were going to start reading about the complications we had during system assembly or issues we uncovered during work, I will have to disappoint you; you are in the wrong place. We had no problems, no difficulties, no issues of any kind. Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard worked smoothly and stably. When there was no serious load Intel processor power-saving technologies lowered the CPU clock frequency multiplier and reduced its Vcore.

When the load increased, its clock multiplier increased to 21x due to Intel Turbo Boost technology. The memory in all cases remained at 1066 MHz with 8-8-8-20-1T timings.

Since Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard performs absolutely normally in nominal mode and doesn’t deviate anywhere from what is considered standard, let’s move on to the performance tests right away. For the purposes of comparison we chose Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme mainboard that you should already be very well familiar with.

Despite the different categories these products belong too, both boards perform almost equally fast, and in a number of cases the small Asus Rampage II Gene looks even more attractive. The only not quite successful test was SuperPi.

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.

For some reason, we always subconsciously expect a small mainboard to consume less power than a full-size one, but this time we can’t claim even the parity between the two solutions. Strange as it might seem, but microATX Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard turned out about 25-35 W more power-hungry than its larger competitor. Only under maximum processor load the power consumption difference drops to 20 W remaining still pretty noticeable. The mainboards were compared in their fully-functional state, no controllers were disabled, all settings were at their defaults, we only enabled all power-saving technologies in the mainboards BIOS. For some reason, this was when I thought about the external LCD Poster panel but its power consumption was minimal and disabling it didn’t affect the results. Unfortunately, we will have to put up with the fact that in nominal mode Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard cannot be considered an energy-efficient solution.