by Paul Lilly — Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Maingear Vybe Review: Dual GTX 1070s And Kaby Lake Cranked To 5GHz

Maingear Vybe: Power Consumption & Noise

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter.

Total System Power Consumption And Acoustics

Tested at the Outlet

Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet.

We measured the load wattage on this system by running a combination of Prime95 and Furmark for an extended period of time and then taking note of peak usage. It took a few tries to get an accurate reading, as the overclock wasn't fully stable in Prime95—it would error out after a period of time and drop CPU usage to less than 100 percent. We rectified this by selecting the 'Small FFTs' torture test (we normally run the 'In-place large FFTs' test), which kept the CPU humming at 100 percent for a longer period of time.

The Vybe peaked at 519W, which means there is plenty of headroom left in the 860W power supply. Equally impressive is its idle power usage of just 68W, one of the lowest usages of the bunch.

Noise

No, this is not the version of FurMark we used to test the Vybe's thermal and noise attributes

A relatively compact case with an overclocked processor and dual graphics cards can be a recipe for a noisy system, but that wasn't the case here. The Vybe is a quiet system, even when gaming. It's only when fully stressing the CPU and both GPUs that all the fans start to make some noise, but even then it's not what we would consider loud.