GIGABYTE G1.Sniper M3 & G1.Sniper 3 Motherboard Reviews

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 GIGABYTE G1 Sniper M3 has considerably lower power requirements than the G1 Sniper 3 did. While the systems are sitting idle, the Sniper M3 was pulling only 65 Watts and the G1 Sniper 3 was pulling 25 Watts more and sitting at 90 Watts idle. Loading up Prime95 Large FFT’s the G1 Sniper M3 was pulling only 152 Watts at the wall while the G1 Sniper 3 was pulling 179 Watts.