GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 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.

Benchmark Results: At only 83 Watts the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 had the lowest idle power consumption of all the boards that we tested, it was 21 Watts lower than the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme and 8 Watts lower than the ECS X79R-AX. Firing up 3DMark 11 the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 pulled 243 Watts, 22 Watts below the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme. Prime95 is the same story, the X79-UD7 pulled 267 watts while the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme was pulling 288 Watts.