GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R (Rev. 2.0) Motherboard Review

Power Consumption

Power consumption is a pretty big deal nowadays so I went ahead and ran some pretty simple power consumption tests on both boards utilizing the same hardware on each board. A Kill-A-Watt power meter was used in these readings. For idle temp measurement, I let the system sit idle for about an hour with no screen save and then took the measurement.

For the load measurements, Prime95 was used with in-place large FFT’s running on all cores to max them out at 100% for maxiumum power draw. I also ran the latest version of FurMark at 1280×1024 to put a full load onto the video card. As mentioned, identical hardware was used in testing the motherboards being compared. A Kill-A-Watt power meter was used in the readings.

The GIGABYTE X58A-UD3R used quite a bit less power than the ASUS Rampage II Extreme. I personally wasn’t expecting such a difference. Drawing 187 watts from the wall, the GIGABYTE X58A-UD3R used 61 watts less than the Rampage II Extreme’s 248 watts. Under full load, the difference isn’t as pronounced but still a decent difference nonetheless. The X58A-UD3R pulled 621 watts compared to the R2E’s 662 watts for a difference of 41 watts. Remember, a GTX 480 was used in this total system consumption test so you more or less won’t see these high numbers as the GPU was known to be a power hog.