| ASUS P6X58D-Premium SATA6G Motherboard |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards | |
| Written by Olin Coles | |
| Thursday, 18 February 2010 | |
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Page 15 of 17
Power Consumption ResultsLife is not as affordable as it used to be, and items such as fuel and electrical energy top the list of resources that have exploded in price over the past few years. Add to this the limit of non-renewable resources compared to demand and you can see that the prices are only going to get worse. Planet Earth is needs our help, and needs it badly. With forests becoming barren of vegetation and snow capped poles quickly turning brown, the technology industry has a new attitude towards suddenly becoming "green". Motherboard manufacturers, in particular, have been touting their new energy saving features. How effective these power management system are, is exactly what we intend to measure in our power consumption tests. Up to this point, Benchmark Reviews has compared each X58-Express motherboard against one-another in benchmark performance tests. For this section, only one topic is of primary concern: electrical power consumption. So then, since the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P has relegated as the reference for our benchmarks, it should be interested to see how old power-management technology compares to the new features.
To measure system power consumption, Benchmark Reviews uses the Kill-A-Watt EZ (model P4460) power meter made by P3 International. A baseline test is taken as the system is allowed to boot into Windows and rest idle at the login screen for three minutes before power consumption is recorded. Once the baseline reading has been taken, Lavalys EVEREST Ultimate Edition is loaded and the System Stability Test is run with 100% stress on the CPU and FPU for five minutes and the results recorded. Next, the CPU, FPU, Cache, and System Memory stress options are turned on for five minutes. After the CPU/Cache/RAM test results are recorded, our final loaded power consumption reading is taken with the video card running at 100% using the FurMark stress test. Power consumption is at it's least-controlled state before the Operating System and drivers can manage the hardware and deliver power efficiency. For this reason, power usage within the BIOS setup page is much higher than at idle. The Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P, which lacks additional Ethernet, USB-3.0, or SATA 6Gb/s controllers, offered the best result at 166 watts of consumption. The Gigabyte X58A-UD7 required 170W, while the ASUS P6X58D-Premium fit in-between with 168W consumed. At idle, both the Gigabyte GA-X58-UD7 and ASUS P6X58D-Premium measured 136W, which is slightly more than the EX58-UD4P required. When the power is turned up for 100% processor utilization, all three motherboards increased power consumption by nearly 84 watts. When the processor, system memory, and cache subsystem were all taxed, the EX58-UD4P increased by 92W over idle, while the Gigabyte GA-X58-UD7 added 96W and the ASUS P6X58D-Premium consumed 94W. Taken as a whole, all three X58-Express motherboards shared nearly identical power efficiency features and delivered similar power consumption. The level of power savings can be further improved using Intel SpeedStep and Core-i7 C-state features in conjunction with motherboard tools.
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Comments
Why is this a con when this is not the fault of the motherboard but of the OS?
It's a con.
I don't see how it is different to have 4GB RAM + 1GB GPU or 3GB RAM + 1GB GPU. In the end your CPU will only address 4GB memory so in the dual channel config you are wasting 1GB. Assuming a 2GB GPU in dual channel configs you will get 4GB RAM + 2GB GPU= 2GB RAM + 2GB GPU which means you will waste 2Gb of RAM (assuming the OS will keep favouring GPU memory over RAM). In triple channel you would get 3GB RAM + 2GB GPU = 2GB RAM + 2GB GPU.
If the OS decides to cut off the extra 1GB from the GPU then you still end up with 3GB RAM and 1GB GPU in both configs.
Not a con.
My rating is subjective, and it is my own. As I say at the beginning of the Conclusion page: Please do not base your purchases solely on our conclusion.
You stated that 6 of 32 PCIe lanes are borrowed from graphics for USB 3.0/SATA-6G support. However, Intel?s X58 IOH supports 36 PCIe lanes, of which 32 are required for 16x/8x/8x triple-SLI/CFX. I?m not sure why the motherboard would reserve six lanes, since only four are used by the ASUS U3S6 PCI-E 4x expansion card. It appears that the graphics performance of this motherboard may not be crippled after all. Although I?m still not sure what happens in the 16x/16x/1x configuration, since an extra lane is required.
If it is an enthusiast board as you say, you'd expect rookies to buy a simpler solution, no? Complication not really a con here!
The X58 IOH has: 36 PCIe lanes, 4 PCIe lanes linking to the ICH10 southbridge, and a QPI link to the CPU. Unless ASUS are insane, the SATA3 and USB3 controllers would use 4 PCIe lanes from the IOH, leaving a full 32 PCIe lanes for graphics (16 + 16, or 16 + 8 + 8). The PCIe 1X slot, the 1X lane for 16 + 16 + 1 mode, and PCIe lanes for the gigabit LAN would be provided by the ICH10.
#2. Windows client(Non server variants), use to support PAE for memory reasons, but drivers ALSO need to correctly support the feature otherwise memory/data corruption can happen. MS decided too many companies couldn't make decent drivers and disabled extended memory for non-server versions.
#3. Who uses 32bit OS's anymore? That's like using dial up when you have access to FIOS.
(2) Am I correct to assume that the ASUS motherboard will not support SATA-III Raid 0 ?
(3) Which gives the most bang-for-the-buck: the Crucial RealSSD-C300 with a SATA-III controller (the Marvell SE128 on the Gigabyte motherboard), or the Intel SSD 80GB with a SATA-II controller (the Marvell SE123 on the ASUS motherboard) ?
(4) And finally, if I go with the Gigabyte board, I am thinking about going with the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 as opposed to the ?UD7... as I am an architect using CAD and GIS and not a gamer and thus don?t see the need for advanced cooling. Any problems with this decision ?
2) You are correct.
3) Crucial is faster for sure, but I think the OCZ Agility or Corsair Nova are the best bang for the buck.
4) I would use P55 and not X58. My company has built many CAD/CAM systems, and you want to spend your money on a very fast HDD or SSD, decent video card, and plenty of RAM. P55 does a better job with memory and CPU performance than X58... clock for clock.