ASUS Crosshair V Formula ‘Bulldozer’ Motherboard Review

System 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: The FX-8150 and the ASUS Crosshair V Formula had a power consumption at idle 15 Watts lower than the Phenom II X6 1100T. Once we started to load up the system, the FX-8150 started to draw more power. Running Prime95 large FFT’s the FX-8150 pulled 14 Watts more than the Phenom II X6. When we fired up 3DMark 11, the FX-8150 continued to draw more power. In fact it was pulling 291 Watts which is 27 Watts more than the Phenom II 1100T.