ASUS P9X79 Pro Intel X79 Motherboard Review

System Power Consumption

Since power consumption is a big deal these days, we ran some simple power consumption tests on our test beds. The systems ran with the power supplies, case fans, video cards and hard drives. To measure idle usage, we ran the system at idle for one hour on the desktop with no screen saver and took the measurement. For load measurements, Prime95’s in-place large FFT’s were run on all cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load for maximum power consumption and heat. Curious about real world scenarios, we decided to drop Furmark and ran 3DMark 11 on the performance preset and took the maximum power consumption during the first GPU test.

Benchmark Results: The idle power consumption of the ASUS P9X79 Pro was just below the 100Watt mark at 97Watts. When we loaded up the Intel Core i7 3960X with Prime95 Large FFT’s we saw an average power draw of 288Watts once the i7 3960X dropped out of Turbo. During the first few moments when turbo was active we saw a power draw of 330Watts on the ASUS P9X79 Pro. Our gaming load using 3DMark 11 was lower than most of our systems drawing only 236Watts. The only system that had a lower gaming power consumption was the EVGA Z68 FTW with 208 Watts.