Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die ... and then continue the game in the past.

Amazing look at that ... interestingly enough COD4 benefits from CPU differences in the higher resolutions from more processor power, meaning in the lower resolutions our graphics card is the  bottleneck.

Among the GF8200 and 680I based mainboards very marginal differences. But the 790GX kicks in much harder, I have no explanation for this, we ran the test 3 times to make sure the results could be replicated and for all setups we used the same graphics driver. No clue.

Power consumption

Alright then, let's monitor something besides performance... power consumption.

As you can see, the power consumption is pretty good, actually.

In an idle state the 790GX mainboard without a graphics card installed utilized 97 Watts, with a graphics card installed you'll jump towards 155 Watt.

Once we start utilizing the four CPU cores the wattage jumps up quickly. 217 Watts with 4 cores stressed and no VGA installed. And 290 Watts with a graphics card installed. In this last situation I had a Radeon HD 4870 X2 installed, which apparently pushed up power consumption overall a little opposed to the 3870 in all other circumstances.

I must say, though the power management features work great, I still find the Phenom X4 processors to be a tad on the power hungry side.