Part 2: Which motherboard company is more efficient, ASUS or Gigabyte?

The Software

In our previous article we detailed how Gigabyte’s DES and ASUS’s AI Gear 3+ utilities work, so we will just show you some screen shots of each system running on the new test system. These screen shots show the most efficient setting on each platform.

The Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 motherboard running Level 3 dynamic voltage and dynamic CPU frequency is as good as things get when it comes to lowering power consumption. Notice the multipler on the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 remains at 6x and the bus speed is 333MHz with a CPU voltage of 1.056V. Since everything is dynamic on the Gigabyte board once you start using the platform the multiplier jumps back up to the normal value of 9 and the overall clock frequency is then 3GHz.

The ASUS P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP@N Edition platform can be seen above running the max power saving setting. This setting drops the core speed down to 1799MHz (200MHz lower than Gigabyte) by lowering the multiplier down to 6x and dropping the bus speed to just 299MHz (Gigabyte remains at 333MHz). The CPU Voltage on the max power saving setting is just 0.986V, which is thanks to the lower clock frequency and FSB values. Once in max power saving mode the board remains there no matter how much stress is put on the system, so if you run benchmarks in the max power saving mode you’ll get some pretty low scores.