ECS Z97-PK Deluxe mATX Motherboard Review
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System Power Consumption
While performance is important, in todays world power consumption is also important. With the only difference being the motherboard and processor, we took a look at the power usage of both systems. Using a P3 Kill-A-Watt meter a measurement was taken while the system was idle, sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. A reading was also done during a load test of Heaven run five times.
The ECS Z97-PK Deluxe motherboard with the Intel Pentium G3258 CPU was pulling in only 33 Watts, where the ASRock with AMD APU was pulling down 72 Watts at idle. Once we placed a load on the system by running 3DMark Extreme, the ECS Z97-PK power usage increased by 163 Watts, maxing out at 196 Watts. While the AMD based system went up by 231 Watts, to 303 Watts. While we realize there is a big difference in the system chipsets, this does show that systems do not need to be power hungry in order to perform well. Plus, with the difference in price between the two motherboards and processors, if you take into consideration the difference in power utilization, the difference in price increases.