Testing (continued):
PCMark Vantage shows all three motherboards performing similarly in the Productivity, Communications and Music scores. Again the dedicated graphics solution takes the honors in the Gaming test and the Zotac motherboard falls short in GPU intensive tasks.
I have added an underclocked P5N7A-VM configuration to the power consumption tests. This configuration was identical to the standard P5N7A-VM setup except the Q6600 CPU was under clocked to 1.8GHz (9 x 200MHz) and used a vcore of 1.1V (with vdroop this resulted in a actual vcore of 1.0V when loaded).
The CPU idle temperatures seem a bit high on the P5N7A-VM, but there's a good chance they aren't being measured properly. The more notable number here is the total system power consumption of each system and configuration. It's no surprise that the Zotac ITX motherboard takes the honors here, but the underclocked P5N7A-VM is also sipping the juice at a very minimal 69watts.
