Power Consumption

Power consumption measurements have become a traditional part of our mainboard reviews. We used Extech Power Analyzer 380803 device. 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 subsystem. We recorded the maximum readings.

No wonder that during CPU overclocking the system based on Gigabyte mainboard consumes considerably more power than the system based on Asus. We had to push the voltages a little higher in order to ensure stability during higher CPU overclocking. However, even in nominal mode the system based on Asus consumes less power and only under higher load the difference decreases and then disappears completely.