MSI P67A-GD65 Intel Socket 1155 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 was 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 to performance ratios, the new Sandy Bridge platforms are have much better power consumption than the earlier Intel P55 chipsets. Idle power consumption of the MSI P67A-GD65 was nearly as low as we have seen it. There was only one Watt separating the MSI P67A-GD65 and the lowest consuming board. Once we fired up Prime95 the MSI P67A-GD65 was two Watts higher than the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe. 3DMark 11 shows the MSI P67A-GD65 pulling 198 Watts at the wall, which is the same number we saw with the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe.