Additional Power Consumption Tests

Having come across pretty strange and barely predictable behavior demonstrated by EVGA X58 SLI LE mainboard, we shared our results with the company representatives and asked if we could get a new BIOS version that would hopefully be free from the uncovered issues. WE sincerely hope that the EVGA developers responsible for BIOS updates are simply on summer vacation and haven’t been laid off as a result of difficult economic situation, because there was no new BIOS revision available to us. Therefore, we had to work with the current, relatively old BIOS version from May 22, 2009.

Instead of a new BIOS version e were offered several ways of avoiding the problems we had pointed out. Namely, our inability to control the operation of Intel Turbo Boost. After changing the “Turbo Mode Function” parameter to Disabled we had stay in the same screen, press F10 key to save and exit without actually exiting to the main screen. As for the increasing processor Vcore under heavy load, we were assured that the voltage setting is within normal range, and the higher readings are just the result of not very precise monitoring.

At this point we would like to take the opportunity and ask EVGA engineers to possibly fix the incorrect monitoring issue in the upcoming BIOS versions. As for us, we decided to perform additional system power consumption tests with VDroop enabled in the mainboard BIOS.

The results of these tests are more than illustrative. In idle mode and under relatively high loads the power consumption of both systems is practically the same, no matter if protection against VDroop is enabled or not. However, under heavy loads the difference becomes much more significant and reaches up to 40 W, when we are trying to oppose VDroop. Increased voltage is the only explanation to this phenomenon. Moreover, these results are also confirmed by a significant difference in processor core temperatures, which grows substantially with increased core voltage. Looks like the monitoring does work fine on EVGA X58 SLI LE, however, the extreme increase in the CPU Vcore as well as other pointed out BIOS issues need to be fixed in the new BIOS versions.