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Overall Power Consumption
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Idle and Load
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AMD has made their position on power consumption clear, with much attention being directed to performance per watt. With that said, it seemed appropriate to run a couple of tests to see the wattage draw of each system, as measured at the outlet. In each test, Cool'n'Quiet was enabled and the test beds were left to idle for 30 minutes before their wattage was recorded. Next, we ran two iterations of Prime95's torture test set for maximum power consumption and heat to pin both CPU cores to 100%. Again, each system was left in that state for a full 30 minutes before recording the wattage draw.
We found the power consumption of the M2A-VM HDMI to track closely with the MSI K9AGM2, which was used during our initial launch piece. With Cool 'n' Quiet enabled, both 690G based boards ran 4 to 8 watts less than the nForce 430 based boards. When we pinned the CPU usage, the ASUS M2NPV-VM was the most power hungry at 141w while the two 690G boards and the M2N-MX were a closer match at 131 and 133w respectively.
