GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 Intel Z68 Motherboard Review

GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 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: The ASUS P8Z68-V Pro pulled slightly more power from the wall than the GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 did, with the exception of sitting idle. At Idle the GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 pulled 4 Watts more than the ASUS P8Z68-UD7-B3. Loading up the Intel Core i5 2500K with Large FFT’s in Prime 95 the GIGABYTE Z68-UD7-B3 was running 14 Watts lower than the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro. Firing up 3DMark 11 the GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7 still managed to pull 10 Watts less than the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro.