MSI P67A-GD65 Motherboard Review

Power consumptionTo test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the system takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment.

As expected, overclocking did show a rather substantial increase in power consumption, especially when under load. The stock features of the CPU allow for very effective power saving methods, like dropping the CPU voltage to around 0.810V when idle. The load voltage was also very low at just 1.184V. When overclocking, we were forced to remove these power saving features, which definitely didn’t go well for keeping power consumption as low as possible!