ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard Review

ASUS Sabertooth 990FX 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 ASUS Sabertooth 990FX pulled more at Idle and under the 3DMark 11 benchmark than either of the other two boards. At Idle the Sabertooth 990FX pulled 113 Watts at the wall while the ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 and the MSI 990FXA-GD80 both pulled 106 Watts. Under the synthetic gaming load of 3DMark 11 the Sabertooth 990FX peaked at 268 Watts, while the ASRock was the lowest with 250 Watts and the MSI was right on the median with 259 Watts. Loading up the CPU with Large FFT’s in Prime 95 the Sabertooth was the lowest power consuming with only 221 Watts, which is 7 Watts lower than the ASRock 890FX and 23 Watts lower than the MSI 990FXA-GD80.