MSI 990FXA-GD80 Motherboard Review – AMD 990FX Chipset

MSI 990FXA-GD80 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 only area of power consumption that shows a hefty difference is when we loaded the CPU up with Prime95 Large FFT’s. The MSI 990FXA-GD80 maxed out at 244 Watts at the wall while the ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 pulled only 228 Watts. If you run Prime95 you will likely never top the load that is put on to the processor during the stability tests that it provides. When we fired up Futuremarks 3DMark11 to simulate a gaming power consumption we saw only 9 watts separating the two boards with the MSI 990FXA-GD80 pulling slightly more power at the wall.