ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme Motherboard Performance 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 was 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 ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme does draw a bit more power than our other P67 boards; this can be attributed to the Lucid Hydra chip. Our idle power numbers for the ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme were sitting at 87 Watts, this is 15 Watts higher than the ASUS P8P67 motherboard. Comparing the same two boards, the ECS P67H2-A Black Extreme saw numbers as much as 20 Watts higher. These are the highest numbers we have seen on a Intel P67 system, though it is also the only board that has had the Lucid chip integrated into it.