|Zotac H55ITX-C-E Mini-ITX WiFi Motherboard|
|Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards|
|Written by Servando Silva|
|Wednesday, 13 October 2010|
Page 15 of 17
Gigabyte H55N-USB3 Power Consumption
I've been talking about a high-efficiency platforms a lot recently. High efficiency represents processing power between power consumption. Less power consumption means higher efficiency. Mini-ITX H55 motherboards are planned to have a very high efficiency if powered with the appropriate CPU. The real deal here is that most users will buy this motherboard and pair it with a Clarkdale CPU such as the Core i3 530 or a Core i5 661. These processors have a low TDP compared to the Core i7 LGA1366 CPUs. So, let's pair a Core i3 530 CPU to this platform and measure the overall power consumption with a P3 International Kill-a-watt EZ power meter. The CPU performance of a Core i3 has proven to be at least 3 times faster than the Atom CPU and sometimes up to 5 times faster. But, does it consume 3 times more power than the ION 330 platform? That's what we are about to test.
At Idle mode, the Zotac H55ITX has got the highest power consumption result in the charts. Taking up to 10 extra watts compared to the H55N-USB3, it represents 20% extra consumption, which isn't good for an HTPC. Considering your PC will remain at dle modes a big part of the time you're using it, this result is very important to analyze. But remember the H55ITX has got the most crowded PCB design because it included 6 S-ATA ports and a WiFi module with 2 antennas, which might explain. When we start making the CPU work, the whole panorama changes; now the Zotac H55ITX-C-E needs less watts to fluidly reproduce HD videos and play video games and even at Prime95 it takes almost 10 watts less to do the work. Of course, when overclocked, the Zotac ITX platform takes much more energy and produces more heat, but that equally happens on the rest of the tested contenders.