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.

We are not surprised to see high power consumption readings off MSI Eclipse Plus mainboard in the nominal CPU mode. We do remember about the relatively hot additional PCI Express controller - NVIDIA NF200. We see the same pretty expected situation in idle mode and in VGA burn mode during overclocking. Even though Intel processor power-saving technologies stop working on Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P at 188MHz base frequency and keep running on MSI Eclipse Plus. However, the power consumption readings during overclocking in CPU burn mode somehow stand out. During optimal overclocking of both systems to 181MHz and 185MHz base frequency respectively, their power consumption becomes almost equal, although we increased the CPU Vcore on MSI mainboard, but not on Gigabyte. Moreover, during maximum CPU overclocking, MSI Eclipse Plus board appears much more energy-efficient than Gigabyte. You probably suspect that there must be some mistake in our measurements, don’t you?

But there is no mistake. Everything is absolutely logical if we recall that when the processor workload is high – and this is exactly what LinX does - the processor on MSI Eclipse Plus mainboard works not only at a lower frequency but also at a considerably lower Vcore. As a result, the “savings” turn out even greater than the negative effect from the hot Nvidia NF200 PCI Express controller. Nothing changes even if we lower the CPU workload and get down to four computational threads, for example. The CPU clock frequency and Vcore increase in this case, but since the workload is lower, the resulting power consumption is even smaller than before. So, it turns out that we compare the mainboards’ power consumption in different testing conditions and this is when MSI’s “win” is absolutely justified. The CPU works at lower speed and with lower voltage setting, it is slower, but more energy-efficient.

We are going to charge our teeing methodology for power consumption tests very soon. Namely, we could try and measure the work it takes the boards to complete a certain task. MSI mainboard consumes less power, but it will it longer to finish that is why the total amount of energy required to complete this task may end up being higher. We’ll see. And today we have to admit a seemingly paradoxical result: during overclocking and under heavy processor load MSI Eclipse Plus mainboard will be relatively energy-efficient, although in all other cases it will consume more power.