Native SATA 6Gbit/s Arrives - AMD 890GX Motherboards Examined

Temperature & Power Consumption

Temperature

Both motherboards were relatively cool at the Southbridge heatsink, with the MSI having the advantage.

Power Consumption

The AMD 890GX chipset appeared to have lower power draw at idle, measuring around 11W less than the 790GX. Note that these two results were done using the integrated graphics. For the Gigabyte and MSI boards however, we switched to a discrete graphics card, which explained the higher power consumption. Despite its mATX dimensions, the MSI board consumed a similar amount of power at peak but its idle was impressively low.