Overclocking | Power Consumption

Let's up the ante a little more, we now increase the processor multiplier towards 28 on all cores x 150 MHz QPI = 4200 MHz.

At this time we have a fully stable overclock ... unfortunately we are still on air cooling .. when we fire off Prime95 after a while the temperatures get out of hand (over 85 C) and we get a system shutdown. As you can imagine ...  the sky is the limit here. Apply enough cooling and you can go far, really far.

Power consumption

If you keep everything within baseline configuration, your power consumption will be as normal as any X58 motherboard. Overclock however sincerely draws a lot of power from the PC as everything is fed more power and using that combined with higher clock frequencies. We measured the system in three stages:

• Default Core i7 3200 MHz
• Overclocked Dummy settings at 3600 / 3750 MHz
• Overclocked manual at 4040

Now this is not for the faint hearted ... overclocking seriously eats up power.

Our test is simple, we take the PC to the overclocked state and then stress the processors with Prime95. The system has a GeForce GTX 280 installed as well. Though it adds 50 Watts idle power consumption, we will not stress it for the power consumption test. For this test all power consumption features like CE1 etc are disabled, and Vista is set to performance mode. Here we go:

As you can see, that's serious business. You probably do not want to purchase a system like this with a green feeling in mind. Look how power consumption explodes once we start to overclock. Again, a graphics card (GTX 280) is in this system, yet in idle. Only the processors cores are stressed.

Right, with that in mind, I think it's time for us to look at motherboard performance. We'll be conduction test sessions with these overclocking results included.