Before bringing this article to a close, we'll take a look at power consumption of these motherboard. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power each was consuming with a power meter. 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 motherboards alone.
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Total System Power Consumption
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Tested at the Outlet
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At idle, most of the systems hung around 10W or so of each other, although the diminutive ZOTAC board stood alone at just under the 100W mark. When under a heavy load, however, the field separated quite a bit. The ASUS board topped out at 10W ahead of the next-most power hungy board (the ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3). The ASRock, EVGA, and Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 motherboards made up one cluster of scores, with all three maxing out within 10W of each other (from 174-184W). The most efficient group, comprised of the MSI, ZOTAC, and Gigabyte Z68XP-UD4 motherboards, were all within just a few watts of each other (from 158-162W).
