ECS X79R-AX Black Series 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 ECS X79R-AX pulled the lowest amount of power across both load tests out of our three Intel X79 systems. The idle power consumption was slightly higher than the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7, though it was still lower than the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme.