Power Consumption

Of course, it is a significant advantage in favor of an inexpensive Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P mainboard that it is just as good as many more pricy mainboards out there. However, this is not all it is capable of. It may be even better than some of the higher-end models in certain aspects. And one of these aspects is power consumption. In fact, it is pretty logical: GA-MA770T-UD3P uses a simpler and more energy-efficient chipset and has much fewer onboard controllers.

We decided to see how all these factors affect the actual power consumption readings and compared the consumption of two platforms built on Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P and Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P. The numbers below show the full power consumption of assembled systems (without the monitor) powered from the wall outlet. The CPUs were loaded with 64-bit LinX 0.5.8 utility. Moreover, to measure the power consumption in idle mode correctly, we enabled Cool’n’Quiet 3.0 power-saving technology. Note that we measured power consumption twice: in nominal processor mode and during above described overclocking to 3.8 GHz.

Although both mainboards use four-phase voltage regulator circuitry with the same capacity, their practical power consumption is different. And as we can see from the unexpected results, this difference is pretty interesting.

When the CPU utilization is high, GA-MA770T-UD3P mainboard boasts higher energy-efficiency. And it is quite logical for the reasons explained above. However, the power consumption in idle mode raises some eyebrows. Although, there is no mistake here. Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P is more energy-efficient when the CPU load is low. It is so because more expensive Gigabyte mainboard, unlike GA-MA770T-UD3P, supports not only Cool’n’Quiet but also C1E power-saving technology. That is why when GA-MA790FXT-UD5P is idle, it not just lowers the processor multiplier and Vcore, but also temporarily disables some idle functional units, which saves additional watts. However, C1E support may have been implemented in the BIOS and doesn’t in fact require any special hardware to be integrated onto the board. Therefore, very soon Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P is very likely to have even lower power consumption in CPU idle mode.