Sapphire Pure Black X58 Motherboard 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 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.

Without a doubt, Intel has made leaps and bounds in power consumption with the new Intel 6 series systems. When the Sapphire Pure Black X58 system is sitting idle, it is pulling 119 Watts at the wall. This is 80% more power consumption than the BIOSTAR TP67XE which uses only 66 Watts at idle. When we fire up Prime 95 the Intel Core i7 950 jumps the Sapphire Pure Black X58 up to 213 Watts; this is 52% more power than the lowest Intel P67 system. Running the first GPU test in FutureMark 3DMark 11 the gap continues to close, though we are still consuming 50 Watts more than our lowest system board.