Power-Saving Motherboards: Fact Or Fiction?

Test Setup, SYSmark 2007 Results

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CPU II Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 (45nm, 2.53 GHz, 3MB L2 Cache)
RAM DDR2 2x 2 GB DDR2-800 Chaintech AU2G732-12GH001
RAM DDR3 4x 1 GB DDR3 Crucial BL12864BA1608 at DDR3-1066 speed
HDD Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 500 GB
Row 4 - Cell 0 7,200 RPM, SATA/300, 32 MB cache
DVD LG GGW-H20L
Graphics Card GeCube Radeon HD 4850
Row 7 - Cell 0 GPU: 625 MHz
Row 8 - Cell 0 RAM: 512 MB GDDR3 (993 MHz)
Power Supply Cooler Master RS-850-EMBA 850W
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Operating System SYSmark Windows XP SP2
DirectX 9 Version: April 2007
ATI Graphics Drivers Radeon 8.8
Intel Chipset INF: 9.0.0.1008
Java Java Runtime Environment 6.0 Update 1
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Benchmark Details
SYSmark 2007 Preview Version 1.04Official Run

Testing for this review doesn’t focus on performance, but on power consumption and efficiency. If you’re interested in a performance and features shootout of P45 motherboards, please see our 11-Way P45 Motherboard Shootout or the chipset introduction article P45—The New Chipset Lacks Progress.

SYSmark 2007 Preview Results

Noticeable performance differences are evident among the test products, but most of these differences aren’t significant. Let’s have a look:

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The Productivity benchmark includes Microsoft applications as well as WinZip 10.0, making it representative for many business users. In this run, there are noticeable differences. Foxconn does very well again.

The overall results show that most of the boards perform similarly, though Foxconn has a slight edge over the others