ASUS, BIOSTAR, GIGABYTE, and MSI Intel Z77 Motherboard Round Up

Power Consumption

Since power consumption is a big deal these days, we ran some simple power consumption tests on our test beds. The systems ran with the power supplies, case fans, video cards and hard drives. To measure idle usage, we ran the system at idle for one hour on the desktop with no screen saver and took the measurement. For load measurements, Prime95’s in-place large FFT’s were run on all cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load for maximum power consumption and heat. Curious about real world scenarios, we decided to drop Furmark and ran 3DMark 11 on the performance preset and took the maximum power consumption during the first GPU test.

Benchmark Results: There is a surprising amount of power draw difference between our boards today. The BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 and the MSI Z77A-GD65 were both quite a bit lower than the ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe and the GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H under a heavy CPU load and 3DMark 11. The ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe has a number of options inside the UEFI BIOS that would allow us to conserve power if needed, though we run the systems with minimal tweaking out of the box to try and keep things consistent and repeatable.