Power, Heat, And Efficiency
We manually set a 133 MHz base clock with all power-saving features enabled during both our benchmark and power consumption tests. MSI wins big here with power consumption numbers that are close to those we’ve seen on less-overclockable products.
MSI makes a lot of noise about its Icy Choke design, but this is the first time we’ve seen it produce noticeably lower voltage regulator temperatures. This alone could explain the XPower’s lower power consumption.
A quick comparison of the total performance for today’s three motherboards shows a difference of only 1.25%, even though the clock speed difference between the top and bottom boards was only around 0.4%
Dividing average performance by average power consumption could get ugly:
MSI leads by a huge margin, a fact that should excite efficiency fans, such as our own Patrick Schmid.