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. Results that fall under "No power management" were obtained with Windows Vista running in high-performance mode, while those with power management enabled were taken with Vista in its balanced performance mode.

The DKA790GX Platinum proves more frugal than the DS4H at both idle and under load. MSI's power efficiency advantage ranges from four to seven watts, which isn't much, all things considered.

Overclocking
For quite some time, it's been difficult to recommend AMD processors that don't have unlocked upper multipliers, and that hasn't changed with Phenom II. Curious to see just how far our X4 940 would overclock on the DKA790GX Platinum, we dipped into the BIOS and started fiddling with the CPU multiplier, testing stability along the way with a Prime95 load on each of the CPU's four cores.

Since Phenom II processors have Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) goodness built-in, there's no need to enable the feature in the Platinum's BIOS. You'll want to turn it on if you're using an older 65nm Phenom, though.

Our Phenom II didn't get far with its stock voltage, but cranking the CPU up to 1.4V yielded a stable 3.4GHz with a 17X CPU multiplier. Not content to stop there, we dialed the multiplier up to 17.5X, yielding a 3.5GHz processor clock. This speed wasn't stable under load without an additional voltage bump, this time up to 1.4375V. We couldn't even get the board to post at 3.6GHz, though—not even with extra voltage and a virgin sacrifice.

Of course, as is always the case with overclocking, your mileage—and the actual purity of your sacrifice—may vary.