Power Consumption

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.

In nominal mode when the system is idle or under relatively low workload, EVGA X58 SLI LE consumes more power, but in case of maximum CPU utilization it becomes more energy-efficient than the Asus platform, although the difference is not dramatic. During system overclocking the strange ability of EVGA X58 SLI LE mainboard to emulate the work of power-saving technologies improves the situation even more. Under all types of load the boards consume the same amount of power.

In conclusion I have to say that unlike its elder sister, EVGA X58 SLI LE consumes very moderate amount of power during overclocking. It is in fact comparable with the most energy-efficient solution on Intel X58 Express. This is a very pleasing observation.