Power consumption
We measured system power consumption, sans monitor and speakers, at the wall outlet using a Watts Up power meter. Power consumption was measured at idle and under a load consisting of a multi-threaded Cinebench 2003 render running in parallel with the "rthdribl" high dynamic range lighting demo.

Unfortunately, we couldn't get the Core 2 Duo's C1E enhanced halt state working properly on the ICFX3200 or SD39P2. C1E was enabled in the BIOS, but the boards refused to lower CPU clock speeds at idle unless we invoked SpeedStep via Windows' minimal power management profile. We contacted DFI and Shuttle about the issue, but it's yet to be resolved. Similar problems were encountered with the Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI, which wouldn't throttle processor clock speeds with C1E or SpeedStep. Abit is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it, but we don't have a fix yet.

An inability to throttle the Core 2 Duo processor multiplier keeps the Fatal1ty's power consumption higher than that of the Platinum at idle, but the tables turn under load. There, the Abit board's power consumption is five watts lower than that of the Platinum, perhaps in part because the latter has to power additional onboard peripherals.