Power, Heat, and Overclocking

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AMD puts out a lot of press about its green initiatives, yet the NVidia-controlled K9N2 Diamond drew the least power. Another NVidia board, the K10N780SLIX3-WiFi drew the most power, so we’d have to test dozens of motherboards before we could draw any reliable conclusions about which chipset is most efficient, but these at least seem to offer similar efficiency.

MSI also chatters a lot about the effectiveness of its VRM cooler, and we find the company’s K9N2 Diamond running the coolest. On the other hand, the AMD 790FX comparison board lost, and it’s also made by MSI.

Introduced last fall, the 790FX is far more mature than the 780a SLI and supports a slightly higher HT clock speed when using the same settings.

In fact, the 790FX motherboard also wins in CPU stability, but not by a significant amount.

The motherboard with the more mature chipset also provides the highest stable memory speed. This could be due to chipset design, trace design, or even BIOS.


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