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Motherboards: So they are not main consumers

We have already dealt with various UEFI settings in the CPU part of the energy-saving special. The mainboard only served as a control for the main processor. What about your own electricity consumption?


Undervolting: better not

As the largest collection of chips in the entire PC, motherboards seem like obvious candidates for power-saving measures. But be careful: A large part of the energy consumption of mainboards is attributable to the CPU voltage converters. You can try your hand at efficiency here, but the amount of electricity to be supplied is specified by the processor and its energy consumption is therefore the real adjusting screw. The same applies, on a smaller level, to the working memory and its power supply. The I/O hub active on the mainboard itself, as a descendant of former sets consisting of several chips, usually only has a power consumption of a few watts. The TDP of Intel’s Z690 and thus in this case its actual maximum energy consumption is 6 watts, for example. AMD’s X570 is considered an extreme exception with 15 W, but also consumes less than 10 W in everyday life. Other controller chips on mainboards are even more economical, only Aquantia’s 10G Ethernet controllers are sometimes provided with heat sinks – by up to 3 W dissipate in a very small space.











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The following topics can be found in the article:

  • Undervolting: Better not with mainboards
  • Strict shutdown of controllers instead of fine tuning
  • Tuning: Optimized UEFI settings AM4, S1151, S1700
  • Special case soft off
  • Practical tests with optimizations: Power consumption PC off, Windows idle, CPU full load
  • Over 60 mainboards in comparison of the power consumption






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The post Undervolting, shutting down controllers, optimized UEFI setups and more appeared first on Gamingsym.