Quote: Originally Posted by
sushisan 
1) The power consuption is very variable in the reviews. What is the REAL consumtion of the mother (without any SATA ,IDE, USB or PCI attached???)
2) There are a power connector for 12V P4 (the 4 pins near the CPU). What happen if are not used?
If you don't power the four-pin connector, the motherboard will not operate at all. I have, uh, tested this.
Regarding power consumption, I have measured this in a careful way.
My computer uses the D945GCLF, with a 1-gig DDR2 memory module, a full-time fan for the chipset (powered from the 12V rail), a case fan plugged into the system fan header on the mobo, a 2.5" 120G SATA HDD, an IDE-interface compact flash adapter, a 10.4" touchscreen display, a "slim" CD/DVD combo drive, keyboard, mouse, a Garmin USB GPS puck, and a Belkin USB wireless Ethernet interface. All devices supported by the chipset are enabled. The computer draws 34 watts continuously at 13.6 volts from a regulated power supply. When spinning up a DVD or CD at full speed, the consumption goes to 40 watts continuous, maybe occasionally peaking to 41 watts. I am not guessing here, these are careful measurements made with the right equipment.
The power supply is an M2-ATX-HV, which at this input voltage is about 98% efficient.
I'm running the monitor from the 12-volt rail--it's plugged into an HDD power connector.
I have not run it without the drive, but without the monitor, the USB wireless interface, and without a CD in the combo drive, the consumption is about 20 watts. The fans together consume no more than a watt or two.
Those who are using up 50-75 watts with this motherboard must be running some big honking 3.5" hard disks, or really hammering the processor and chipset. My tests were run with XP Professional (with nothing done to reduce consumption), Garmin Mobile PC running, and playing Solitaire (that touchscreen makes Solitaire a lot more fun, heh, heh). I get the same power consumption no matter what OS I run, and I can boot this box up in either XP, Ubuntu, or MS-DOS.
RickD