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 DFI LANPARTY DK P55-T3eH9 we also included the results for all previously tested LGA1156 mainboards.

Overall, DFI LANPARTY DK P55-T3eH9 mainboard demonstrates comparable results with other solutions except Biostar, which is the most energy-efficient of all but at the expense of lower performance. Only under maximum processor load DFI board for some reason starts to consume about 10 W more.

We see almost the same situation during processor overclocking – the same power consumption as by other mainboards in idle mode or under small processor load and a defeat under maximum load. However, this time this result is quite easy to explain because we had to increase the processor Vcore higher than normal in order to catch up with ASRock and Biostar.