Power Utilization:

Power utilization of the systems at idle and load was monitored at the wall plug using a Seasonic Power Angel. Idle measurements were taken after allowing the systems to completely load Windows. Load measurements were taken while running the Intel Burn Test application. Obviously lower power utilization is preferred.

Idle performance is not the ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe motherboard's strong suite. As you can see the reference board beats the ASUS with a 29% lower power utilization. As a result of SpeedStep power saving technology the overclocked system has similar idle performance because the processor multiplier is reduced to 16 at an idle state.



Load performance brings the two systems closer together. However, the ASUS board still uses 11% more power at stock settings compared to the MSI reference board. Once overclocked power utilization goes up dramatically (an increase of roughly 50%) but this is quite linear to the increase in clock speed of the computer. At 4.7GHz the processor is overclocked 42%, making the 50% increase in power consumption a worthy tradeoff.