MSI X79A-GD65 X79 Motherboard Review

To 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.

The board at idle used a low 122 Watts, though when loaded, it seemed to chug along at quite a large amount of 375 Watts. When overclocked, we saw the load power consumption jump to a staggering 422 Watts. While we say this is high, it’s fairly normal for an X79 based system with large amounts of memory and a high-end graphics card, but this board is higher than what we’ve seen from other X79 based boards.