Power Consumption

We used Extech Power Analyzer device for our power consumption measurements. This device is connected before the system PSU, i.e. it measures 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 Fritz Chess Benchmark to load the CPU and FurMark utility to load the graphics card and recorded the maximum readings.

This more or less routine procedure performed on Foxconn BloodRAGE mainboard suddenly produced very strange results. Its power consumption was much higher than the results we obtained on other mainboards. We had some concerns that the problem could be with the new Enermax Infinity EIN720AWT PSU that we had just started using, however, our suspicions were absolutely unjustified. Asus P6T mainboard tested with the same exact PSU consumed just as much power as it did before. The power analyzer also wasn’t the one to blame: we brought Foxconn BloodRAGE back onto our testbed right after Asus P6T and the readings repeated. Foxconn BloodRAGE consumed 20-30W more in nominal mode, which is extremely too much.

Things appeared not any better during overclocking, either. Right after the OS boot-up, different services start launching changing the processor workload, system starts data indexing and hence keeps sending requests to the hard drives, so system power consumption jumps up and down. However, as time goes by all this action stops and power consumption stabilizes at a certain value that we take as a reading for further analysis. Things turned out not quite like that with Foxconn BloodRAGE mainboard. Even when there seemed to be no real activity going on, the system power consumption kept changing in cycles increasing and then dropping down fast and then growing up to the maximum again. Therefore, the table above mentions an interval rather than one single value for the idle mode readings.

If we take a look at Foxconn BloodRAGE power consumption during CPU overclocking in general, it will be about the same as that of Asus P6T. At least, we could see no serious difference between them as we did in nominal mode. However, it is also not a very good outcome. Asus mainboards for Intel processors consume about as much power as other solutions only in nominal mode or during very slight overclocking, when the processor Vcore remains untouched. As soon as you increase the processor core voltage or even lock it at a certain value, Intel processor power-saving technologies stop working on Asus boards that is why they start to consume much more power than other solutions. Foxconn BloodRAGE mainboard, however, has the same level of power consumption as Asus board even with all processor power-saving technologies intact, which is way beyond average.

We can’t tell for sure why Foxconn BloodRAGE is so power-hungry. There is an opinion that the more phases there are in the CPU voltage regulator circuitry, the better; however, Foxconn BloodRAGE could prove this wrong. It is good to have a lot of phases in this circuitry but only in specific conditions when there is heavy CPU load involved. In idle mode a voltage regulator with fewer phases works better. There is a good reason why many mainboard makers started implementing different proprietary power-saving technologies that change the number of active phases in the processor voltage regulator dynamically depending on the current CPU utilization. By the way, Foxconn, unlike Asus, is not one of them yet.

However, too many voltage regulator phases is not the only reason for such high power consumption on Foxconn BloodRAGE mainboard. In this case the board would be consuming more power in idle mode but about the same during heavy CPU utilization. However, this is not the case. Besides, our tests showed that dynamic deactivation of unused voltage regulator phases doesn’t save too much power anyway: only 3-7W. So, the absence of Foxconn’s proprietary power-saving technologies doesn’t really explain much. There is one thing, though, I can state for sure: even though all processor power-saving technologies remain up and running at all times, Foxconn BloodRAGE cannot be considered an energy-efficient solution neither during CPU overclocking, nor in the nominal mode.