BIOSTAR TP67XE Intel LGA 1155 Sandy Bridge 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.

When it comes to power consumption numbers, the Intel P67 platforms are significantly lower than our Intel P55 system. The BIOSTAR TP67XE has the lowest idle power consumption of all of our systems by six watts. While six watts may not seem like a whole lot, if your system sits idle much of the time, it does show that BIOSTAR has a handle on going green. Firing up Prime 95 large FFT’s our system power consumption increases to 140 Watts. That is the lowest CPU power consumption that we have come across to date by 2.1%. Running the first GPU test in 3DMark 11 gives us an idea of how the power consumption would be under a gaming situation. The BIOSTAR TP67XE draws 193 Watts at the wall when running 3DMark 11; this isn’t the lowest that we have seen, but it is one of the lowest.