MSI Z97I Gaming AC Mini-ITX Motherboard Review

Power Consumption

We used a P3 Kill-A-Watt meter to analyze the power consumption of the test systems. For Idle conditions, the systems were allowed to sit at the desktop for 30 minutes with no additional software running. For Load conditions, we monitored the power usage during all the benchmarks, and ran Prime95 for 30 minutes. Readings were taken at 10 minute intervals for the 30 minutes, the average power usage was used to compare the systems.

Benchmark Results: The difference between a mATX and mITX system are really visible here, at idle there was 18W difference, once the systems were under a load that changed to a 34W difference. With the same hardware across both test systems and the same process used for testing that’s a significant difference in power usage.