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 both mainboards - Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R and Asus P6T – demonstrate almost the same level of power consumption, in all modes the difference makes no more than 5 W. both mainboards are pretty energy-efficient, but the differences stand out during overclocking.

In idle mode Gigabyte mainboard consumes less power, which isn’t surprising. Asus mainboards, except the top models from the Republic of Gamers series can’t overclock CPUs well without increasing their core voltage. However, in this case Intel processor power-saving technologies partially stop working, while on Gigabyte mainboard they stay up and running without any restrictions. The difference in the beginning of the graph is quite noticeable and makes 11 W. under relatively low workload the boards consume about the same power, but I can’t explain why Gigabyte mainboard starts consuming considerably more power under maximum CPU utilization. We have already mentioned that unlike many other mainboards, Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R doesn’t increase the processor core voltage under heavy load for a reason. However, there is no mistake here: the difference is very noticeable and makes 19 W, but this time not in Gigabyte’s favor.