Power consumption and storage
| Power consumption - idle (system) | ||
|---|---|---|
| GIGABYTE MA785GPMT-UD2H (785G) | Intel DH55TC (H55) | ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 (890GX) |
| 45 | 32 | 49 |
The 890GX system is run with AMD Cool 'n' Quiet and ASUS EPU enabled, but as far as power consumption is concerned, the Intel platform is comfortably ahead, consuming around 30 per cent less than the AMD platforms.
| Power consumption - load 2D (system) | ||
|---|---|---|
| GIGABYTE MA785GPMT-UD2H (785G) | Intel DH55TC (H55) | ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 (890GX) |
| 146 | 73 | 127 |
Running Prime95 on all cores, the power-hungry Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition processor propels power usage on the AMD systems. The Intel combination remains superior in terms of power savings, but what's interesting is that the ASUS EPU-enhanced 890GX board is comfortably more efficient than GIGABYTE's 785G under load.
Storage
Regrettably, due to time constraints, we were unable to run our storage benchmarks on the 785G and H55 platforms for a direct comparison, but we do have numbers for the 890GX chipset via ASUS's board.
To see what the board is capable of, we hook up a 2TB, SATA 6Gbps Seagate Barracuda hard drive for our SATA benchmarks and use the same drive in a USB 3.0 caddy for the USB 3.0 benchmark.
Our average results recorded by HD Tach v3.0.4.0 are as follows:
| ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 storage benchmarks | |
|---|---|
| SATA average read speed (MB/s) | 118.1 |
| SATA burst speed (MB/s) | 308.2 |
| SATA random access speed (ms) | 16.6 |
| USB 3.0 average read speed (MB/s) | 110.5 |
| FireWire 400 average read speed (MB/s) | 29.2 |
Putting the numbers into context against previous-generation platforms, the benefits of SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 are clear.
Despite using a mechanical drive with a limiting rotational speed of 7,200 per minute, performance is very decent and the board should bring the best out of quicker storage solutions, i.e. solid-state drives.
USB performance, too, is excellent, with the drive once again proving to be the bottleneck. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for FireWire, which like 785G before it, remains consistently poor.