MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Series Motherboard Review

MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Series 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: Without the AMD Radeon HD 7950 the MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Series Motherboard doesn’t use much power. At idle it was sipping only 40 Watts at the wall, running the latest iteration of 3DMark Fire Strike it hit a maximum of 91 Watts and Prime 95 Large FFT’s hit 113 Watts at the wall.