MSI Big Bang XPower II 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 MSI Big Bang XPower II power consumption fell into the middle of the pack. The idle power consumption was 94 Watts at the wall, 11 Watts more than the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 which has the lowest idle power consumption, and 10 Watts less than the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme. Firing up 3DMark 11 to get some power consumption numbers under a gaming load the MSI Big Bang XPower II pulled 230 Watts at the wall, one of our lowest power consuming motherboards. Loading up our Intel Core i7 3960X with Prime95 Large FFT’s the MSI Big Bang XPower II went to the other side of the spectrum and was the second most power consuming board behind only the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme.