Power Consumption

We used Extech Power Analyzer 380803 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 LinX to load the CPU and FurMark utility to load the graphics card and recorded the maximum readings.

The power consumption of Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P and Asus P6T based systems is very similar in nominal mode, however, things change dramatically during overclocking. When we overclock to 3.8GHz CPU speed, Gigabyte mainboard keeps all Intel processor power-saving technologies up and running as they are, while thing isn’t the case on Asus board because of specific BISO issues discussed earlier. No wonder that Gigabyte mainboard consumes less power. Only when we overclock our processor to 3.95GHz by raising its Vcore, the mainboards power consumption levels become equal in idle mode and under VGA load, and under heavy CPU load Gigabyte board requires even more power than Asus.