Power Consumption

We measured 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 Intel Core i7-860 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 in nominal mode as well as during overclocking. Besides Biostar TPower I55 we also included the results for all previously tested LGA1156 mainboards.

Look what an interesting situation we see on the diagrams. Even during CPU overclocking Biostar TPower I55 mainboard is more energy-efficient than its competitors. Only in idle mode ASRock solution catches up with it but under any type of operational load Biostar board consumes less energy. In nominal mode the difference between the tested mainboards becomes even more obvious. Vdroop protection is disabled because we don’t need it in nominal mode, but in this case Turbo Boost technology works on all mainboards even under heavy loads and it increases their multiplier to 22x. The boards usually increase the processor core voltage a little bit to ensure that it remains stable at higher clock speeds. Biostar TPower I55 leaves the multiplier at 21x that is why it is slower than all other mainboards. But it also doesn’t increase the CPU Vcore that is why the difference in power consumption is so dramatic especially under heavy load.

And what will happen if we enable Vdroop protection in the nominal mode? We don’t have these results on the diagrams, but we did run this experiment. The mainboards will perform equally fast and their power consumption will also become the same, and under maximum load Biostar solution will consume even more power than the others. So, should we or should we not enable “CPU Load Line” on Biostar TPower I55 in the nominal mode? You will have to answer this question yourselves depending on your preferences and typical usage model. If you are looking for an energy-efficient system and a 5% lower performance in heavy applications compared with other mainboards is not an issue, then you shouldn’t enable this function. If you would like to have your system run as fast as systems on other mainboards and you are not concerned with higher power consumption under maximum work load, then you’d better enable this protection.