BIOSTAR TA990FXE AMD 990FX 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 BIOSTAR TA990FXE fell between our other AMD 990FX systems in all aspects of our power consumption tests. Sitting Idle, the BIOSTAR TA990FXE was pulling 89 Watts at the wall while the lowest draw was the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 with only 82 Watts. Loading up the CPU with Prime 95 the BIOSTAR TA990FXE was pulling 237 Watts while the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 switched roles and was pulling the most power with 241 Watts.