Motherboards with the fewest on-board add-in controllers should obviously have the lowest power consumption, creating high expectations for low power use by MSI and Gigabyte. But looking beyond the obvious, differences in PWM design can also influence this test.

Gigabyte gives us the lowest idle power consumption, while MSI has the lowest full-load power use. This appears to mesh with MSI’s claims of superior PWM efficiency.
On the other hand, Asus’ power consumption is reflective of the company's claim that it's running all four cores at the processor's most aggressive Turbo Boost multiplier. As mentioned, you can counteract this by manually redefining the ratios for each core based on Intel's specification. If you don't, we can assure you that pushing higher performance costs additional power.

Gigabyte has the lowest PWM temperature, but its heat sink is also much larger than MSI’s. We only see that it runs cooler. We don't know exactly how much of that temperature difference is due to less power use.

Efficiency is a comparison of work to energy. Or, in this case, performance to energy. So, we need a compilation chart of performance results to calculate it. Asus’ performance-oriented settings put it 5.3% above-average.

That 5.3% performance gain doesn't end up serving as an advantage if you're worried about efficiency, given power consumption that's 10.6% higher than average. If you want to drop the P8Z68 Deluxe down to the levels achieved by some of the competing platforms, you have to do extra work to counteract the company's auto-rule (we'd perhaps suggest a UEFI toggle to turn this on or off, rather than manually remapping Turbo Boost ratios).
We used -1 in all of this chart’s calculations to form a 0% baseline, so that nobody could misconstrue it to represent better than 100% efficiency.
- Four Z68 Express-Based Motherboards For Enthusiasts
- ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3
- Z68 Extreme7 Firmware
- Asus P8Z68 Deluxe
- P8Z68 Deluxe Firmware
- Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD5
- Z68XP-UD5 Firmware
- MSI Z68A-GD80 (B3)
- Z68A-GD80 Firmware
- Test Settings And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Crysis And F1 2010
- Benchmark Results: Just Cause 2 And Metro 2033
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Overclocking
- A Word On Warranties
- Whose Enthusiast-Class Z68 Board Is Best?
My AsRock AliveNF6G-VSTA in my warehouse full of dust, mites, cobweb still works.. Recently upgraded to 4GB RAM and GTS 450 1GB video card..
Gigabyte
MSI
Asus
Asrock
The answer to my first email question to Asus came a three full weeks later AFTER I had decided to return the board. AND the answer was an absolutely stupid response that did not address the real problem. Still wanting an answer to my question, I clarified the question and sent it back to Asus again. TWO weeks later I got ANOTHER asinine response from them. At that point I realized I was wasting my time.
I don't know how good AsRock's customer service is since I have not had a problem with the board.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/z68xp-ud3-dz68db,2980.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/z68xp-ud3-dz68db,2980.html
Crashman to the rescue again
Real enthusiasts, on the other hand don't use integrated graphics and already have a dedicated SSD. Enter P67 in the round-up and the winner would still be for almost 18 months running, the $255 Asus P67 WS Revolution.
Luay, real enthusiasts do use integrated graphics just they use it for Quick Sync only.
lol I have succesfully RMA'd many a part!!! Asus, Seagate, Sapphire, Asrock, you name it...
I am surprised at the gigabyte board. The power regulation seems too complicated to be useful, and the lack of UEFI seems strange and will hurt boot performance.
I could care less about using the 3rd pci 16x lane
If you've never gotten a warrenty back than you must have very bad luck. Most companies will happily send a replacement product. OCZ even works with oyu to ensure that you are satisfied with what you recieve back. Out of all the products I've sent in for warranties in the past 3 years, all 4 of them got a working product back. One I didn't bother to ship out because shipping was more than it was worth at the time.
I could care less about using the 3rd pci 16x lane
Agreed, Quads and Tri GPU's are just not worth the price at this stage.
Always had luck with Asus, Gigabyte and MSI boards.