Power Consumption

We are now able to find out what kind of power is being used by our test system and the associated graphics cards installed. Keep in mind; it tests the complete system (minus LCD monitor, which is plugged directly into an AC wall socket).

Idle power consumption was not too bad for an X58 with a six core CPU and an AMD HD 5870.

Load power consumption is a little bit on the high end. It makes us realize that you can get great power savings from newer boards when they are not in use, but once you start making them work they are still going to push up your power bill.

Heat Generation

As a new measure, we are now monitoring the heat generation from the key components on the motherboard; this being the Northbridge, Southbridge (if it contains one) as well as the Mosfets around the CPU. The results are recorded at idle and load during the power consumption tests.

At idle even the overclocked boards were not pushing the limits. GIGABYTE's cooling system does pretty well even outside a case where there is not much direct airflow over the extended heatsink.

Under load the X58A-UD7 gets a little hotter. This is more than likely due to the testing environment. In a case with adequate airflow you should have lower temperatures than what we are seeing here.