Power consumption
That covers the chipset-specific portion of today's festivities. Now it's time to switch gears and explore variables more dependent on motherboard attributes than core-logic components. First up we have power consumption tests. Here we measured system power consumption, sans monitor and speakers, at the wall outlet using a Watts Up Pro power meter. Readings were taken at idle and under a load consisting of a Cinebench render alongside the rthdribl HDR lighting demo. Windows 7's "Balanced" performance profile, which uses CPU power management features, was enabled for this all of our other tests.

Power consumption has become a hot topic among motherboard makers of late, and each board has a few different configuration options tied to BIOS switches and additional Windows software. The GD65 takes the simplest approach: either enable active power-phase switching (APS in the graphs below) or leave it off. With the UD6, you can run with or without Dynamic Energy Saver software installed. There's a Dynamic Energy Saver option for the UD5, too, but it didn't work right with the BIOS we used for testing. The Asus board has three options: an Xtreme Phase mode that's enabled by default and apparently does power phase scaling, an Xtreme-less normal operation mode, and a third mode calibrated by EPU software for Windows.

The GD65 draws less power than the other boards, but then it also has fewer peripheral chips and power phases. The UD6 isn't far behind, and you certainly don't need to bother with Gigabyte's DES software. That isn't the case with the Deluxe, which pretty much requires Asus' EPU app to get into the same power consumption ballpark as the other P55 boards.

Under load, the P55 pack tightens up quite a bit. MSI still comes out on top, but the Asus board draws fewer watts than the Gigabyte.

Our lone X58 board consistently draws more power than the P55 models, nicely highlighting the Lynnfield platform's power-efficiency advantage.

Motherboard peripheral performance
Core logic chipsets integrate a wealth of peripherals, but they don't handle everything. FireWire, Ethernet, and audio are farmed out to auxiliary chips, for example. To provide a closer look at the peripheral performance you can expect from the motherboards we've tested today, we've compiled Ethernet, Serial ATA, USB, FireWire, and audio performance results below.

The P7P55D has the fastest FireWire implementation of the lot, trailed only slightly by the UD6. MSI's GD65 shows some weakness here, with notably slower read and write speeds than the other P55 offerings.

Despite using the very same P55 PCH as the Deluxe and UD6, the GD65's USB transfer rates are also a little slower. Curiously, the MSI board's USB CPU utilization also looks a little high when compared to the rest of the P55 pack. We alerted MSI to this issue, and they're looking into it.

All of these boards have at least one auxiliary storage controller, but none of those chips can match the performance of the P55's own SATA setup. Interestingly, the slow P55 burst speeds exhibited by the Gigabyte board also afflict the MSI.

Gigabit Ethernet performance is pretty even across the field with one exception: the P7P55D Deluxe's secondary LAN port. It's driven by a Realtek controller that rides the antiquated PCI bus, whose limited bandwidth caps throughput more than 200Mbps shy of what's achieved by PCIe Gigabit chips.

Our RMAA results give us a quick assessment of analog audio signal quality with a 24-bit, 192kHz loopback test from the front-channel output to the line input. The UD6 and GD65 both score a little higher than the Deluxe, which isn't terribly surprising given that they both use similar ALC889 codec chips. We haven't seen much of the Via audio codec Asus is using here. In fact, it's not even listed on Via's web site.