MSI Z77A-GD65 Motherboard Preview – Intel Z77 w/ Sandy Bridge

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 MSI Z77A-GD65 has lower power consumption across all of our testing than the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro. At Idle the MSI Z77A-GD65 was pulling only 76 Watts while the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro was pulling 15 Watts more at 91 Watts. 3DMark 11 was the closest test for the systems and the MSI Z77A-GD65 was 7 Watts lower.