Product Listing

MSI P45D3 Platinum (Intel P45)

By Vincent Chang - 29 Jul 2008

Temperature & Power Consumption

Temperature

MSI's elaborate Circu-Pipe 2 cooler seemed to get the job done, as we found the temperatures on the MSI P45D3 Platinum to be comparable with its competitors. In fact, it was slightly better than the ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe, which should be a fairer direct comparison, since the Gigabyte board uses such an extremely large and separate heatsink/heat-pipe solution to achieve its low temperatures.

Power Consumption

Once again, we are looking at the energy savings technologies from these three big motherboard vendors. Previously, we have seen how the ASUS and Gigabyte have quite comparable solutions. So how does MSI fare here? To answer that, we enabled MSI's own Green Power Center through the BIOS options and also installed its utility, setting it to the Max Power Savings profile. Then we measured the maximum power draw in two scenarios: idling at desktop and when running a full load of four threads in SPECviewperf 10.0.

All three boards were almost identical when it came to power draw during idle. At peak however, the MSI board drew a fair bit more than the Gigabyte and the ASUS. This could add up to quite a substantial amount if full load is what you subject your PC to all the time.

For our average power consumption figures, we subjected all the boards to a single run of SYSmark 2004 to simulate a real-world scenario, with idle and peak moments while at the same time, having a power meter measure the average power consumption of the system during the benchmark run. We did this twice, once with the respective energy saving technology enabled and once without. As you can see, in all three cases, having the energy savings technology on will reap some benefits and furthermore, the absolute numbers favored the ASUS and Gigabyte boards. If we're talking about the impact of the energy saving technology however, both the ASUS and MSI showed greater improvement than the Gigabyte, with the ASUS doing the best overall.

Finally, we had noticed that our SYSmark 2004 scores could be affected adversely by the energy savings, probably due to how the manufacturers have implemented their technologies. For the ASUS, this is done by down-clocking the CPU along with lowering its voltages. Hence the performance took quite a hit. While not using a similar method, the performance on the Gigabyte too is affected.

For the MSI however, we found almost negligible difference between the two, which suggests that MSI did not resort to these methods to reduce power draw. You'll get near or close to normal performance but of course the flip side is that the average power draw on the MSI is the highest among all three boards and the margin between having that enabled or not is also less than the ASUS (but higher than the Gigabyte). In short, there appears to be a performance penalty when using these energy saving technologies. However, it should not be that significant for a normal usage scenario and we will still recommend going for some form of energy savings if possible.

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