Power Consumption Testing

Now we come to probably one of the most important sections of our testing and that is power consumption!

Using the power tester you can see in the picture above, we measured power coming from the wall - it is measuring the full system, everything inside the box.

We used prime95 to fully load the CPU processor cores and a score was recorded after five minutes of loading. We recorded the highest wattage level hit and rounded up to the nearest decimal point. An idle wattage level was recorded after staying idle on the desktop for five minutes and here again we also rounded up to the nearest decimal point.

Wow! We couldn't get the ASRock ION 330-BD over 40-watts, no matter what we tried. Also, sitting idle in Windows at 31 watts is very impressive; just compare it to the AMD HTPC system for reference.

We also measured power consumption during Blu-ray playback and again it never went over 40 watts, at maximum it hit 39.8 watts.

Boot Time Testing

We measured using a stopwatch and timed from the point we turned the system on until the very first point the desktop was reached and fully loaded.

We have enabled ASRock's Instant Boot Fast Mode AC feature for this test to show just what it can do.

Well, ASRock Instant Boot works a treat. Around 10 seconds to boot up from its unique sleeping mode and 47 seconds to boot up from a normal turn on. That's not too bad either.

The only thing that is a little annoying with the Instant Boot feature is that it's an extra piece of software you need to run and when you shut down, it actually has to reboot once first and then shut down. Just small issues, but other than that, impressive!