GIGABYTE P67A-UD4 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 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.

When it comes to power consumption numbers, the Intel P67 platforms are significantly lower than our Intel P55 system. The GIGABYTE P67A-UD4 idles at 78 Watts at the wall. We have seen a couple boards with a lower idle, and we have seen them with the same or higher idle power consumption. This shows that the GIGABYTE P67A-UD4 is sitting comfortably in the middle of the pack. Firing up Prime 95 large FFT’s our system power consumption increases to 143 Watts. That is the lowest that we have come across to date by nearly 3.4%. Running the first GPU test in 3DMark 11 gives us an idea of how the power consumption would be under a gaming situation. The GIGABYTE P67A-UD4 runs 1 Watt lower than the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe and the MSI P67A-GD65 and 33 Watts lower than the Intel P55 system with the ECS P55H-AK motherboard!