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 fan, video card and hard drive model. 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 POV-Ray 3.7 was run on all cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load. All of the systems used identical hardware minus the motherboard and processor.

Results: The ECS A780GM-A used more power than the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H at an idle state and about the same at load.  Our first that was to make sure C'N'Q was enabled, but it was in the BIOS.  With Cool'n'Quiet enabled and disabled in the BIOS no difference was noted in power consumption at idle.  This might be another BIOS bug!