Stress Testing and Power Consumption
Stress Test — Putting It All TogetherAnother test we added to the motherboard suite this time around was the stress test. In this we take all the on-board components and make them all work together just to see if they play nicely.
In our case here this meant running WMP10 on an HD video, having PCMark05 run some hard drive tests, running HDTach on the external USB hard drive, playing the large WAV file and running the network bandwidth test, all at the same time. The tests were looped for an hour and we listened for sound ‘jumps’ or video stutters or anything similar.
Our stress testing revealed no problems using the Asus N4L-VM DH motherboard with all the features and options turned on and running. As has usually been the case for many years, the Intel chipsets are among the most stable in the industry.
Power Consumption
In many cases, looking at power consumption of motherboards and chipsets can seem a little over dramatic. After all, when your GPU eats up a couple hundred watts on its own, whats a few more for a chipset? Regardless, we felt the need to use our power meter to test for power consumption at the wall.
Idle power was taken at the Windows desktop while load results were taken from a dual-threaded CineBench run.
Here is an area where the Core Duo processors really shine. Comparing the idle and peak performance of these two platforms, it is obvious that AMD’s once large lead of the Pentium 4 in power consumption will be going away as the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors continue their march into the desktop space. The Asus motherboard and Intel T2600 processor use 61% less power during a full load compared to the AMD X2 platform. This translates into very dramatic performance per watt advantages for the T2600 when we look at all the benchmarks the processor actually won, or even got close to the X2’s performance.
