Power consumption
We measured system power consumption, sans monitor and speakers, at the wall outlet using a Watts Up Pro power meter. Power consumption was measured at idle and under a load consisting of a multi-threaded Cinebench 10 render running in parallel with the "rthdribl" high dynamic range lighting demo.

Now that's a surprise. Nvidia's nForce 590 SLI is notoriously power-hungry, but our 790FX-based Gigabyte board fares only a couple of watts better. So much for Spider's power efficiency advantage.

To be fair, this higher than expected power consumption may not be the fault of the 790FX. Asus' first wave of P35-based motherboards were also a little greedy with their power consumption, but subsequent boards based on the same chipset proved considerably more power-efficient. Let's hope, for AMD's sake, that the GA-MA790FX-DQ6 is the exception rather than the rule.

Overclocking
For our overclocking tests, we lowered the CPU multiplier to 5X and dropped the memory bus speed to 400MHz to take our processor and DIMMs out of the equation. We also dropped the HT processor link speed to ensure that it didn't hinder our overclocking endeavors. From there, we started cranking on the HT clock, managing to push it to a perfectly stable 300MHz before the board started acting up.

Our Gigabyte board was happy to loop Prime95 and the rthdribl HDR lighting demo with a 300MHz HT clock, but any faster, and the board refused to post. Most of the time, it would automatically reboot, returning the system to its default configuration. However, on occasion, it would get stuck in an automatic reboot loop that would reset the system every few seconds until the power was cut manually.

We tried tweaking chipset and HT voltages to coax 310MHz from the board, but to no avail. Not that 300MHz is anything to sneeze at, but for a brand new chipset and a motherboard obviously geared towards overclockers, we were hoping for more.

As is always the case with overclocking, your mileage may vary.