Intel’s ATX12VO Power Standard Successfully Halves Idle Power Consumption in New Test

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Image: ASRock

As you may have heard, Intel is working on a “new” power standard called ATX12VO, which only supplies 12 volts to the motherboard for simplicity and efficiency. An early test published by Heise Online suggests that ATX12V’s replacement works as advertised, decreasing idle power consumption by as much as half on a Core i9-10900K system with SATA SSD and 16 GB of RAM.

An ASrock Z490 Phantom Gaming 4SR (the world’s first ATX12VO motherboard with 10/6-pin power connectors instead of a single, chunky 24-pin one) and High Power HP1-P650GD-F12S PSU were used to demonstrate the potential of the new standard. Heise found that idle power draw was only 13 watts at standard settings. With power-saving features enabled, that figure fell to below 7 watts.

“Even with the BIOS standard settings, the system with a Core i9-10900K, a SATA SSD and 16 GB of RAM achieved a power consumption of only 13 watts when the Windows desktop was idle,” Heise wrote. “Only a few current ATX boards can do this and only with optimized CPU energy saving settings.”

“With activated C-states and activated SATA and PCIe Link Power Management, we were able to reduce the idle value of the ATX12VO test system to below 7 watts.”

ATX12V may not be going away any time soon, but the adoption of more efficient standards are inevitable due to requirements set by regulatory bodies such as the California Energy Commission (CEC), which mandates that idle power consumption of PCs should be halved by 2021.

Image: Intel
Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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