AMD 990FX Mobo Round-Up: Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte

Name: AMD 990FX Motherboard Round-Up
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, August 24, 2011, 10:00 AM EDT

Before bringing this article to a close, we'll take a look at power consumption of the AMD A8-3850 and some competing platforms. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power this new APU was consuming with a power meter, versus other test systems we used for benchmarks in the previous pages. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling on the desktop and while under a heavy workload Keep in mind, this is total system power consumption being measured at the outlet and not the the individual CPUs or GPUs alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

All of the motherboards we tested pulled down similar amounts of power while under load, but there were some more notable differences at idle. The ASRock, Gigabyte, and MSI boards idled within 7W of one another. The Asus CrossHair V Formula, however, consumed 9-13 more watts then the other 990FX-based boards while idling. While measurable, those differences can easily be attributed to only slightly higher voltages being used on the Asus board and are not cause for concern.

Tags: Asus, Gigabyte, Motherboard, Fatal1ty, CrossHair, ASRock, 990FX

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com