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.

Our 780G system consumes much less power at idle than its G35-based rival, particularly when Cool'n'Quiet is free to throttle the processor's clock speed. That alone drops power consumption by eight watts, slipping our 780G rig below the 50-watt mark, and more importantly, 20 watts below the best our G35 Express platform can do. Crank up a combined CPU and GPU load, though, and the G35 Express sips five fewer watts than the 780G.

Motherboard peripheral performance
Core logic chipsets integrate a wealth of peripherals, but they don't handle everything. Firewire and audio are farmed out to auxiliary chips, for example, and so is networking. To provide a closer look at the peripheral performance you can expect from the motherboards we've tested today, we've complied Ethernet, Firewire, and audio performance results below. We've used motherboard rather than chipset names here because these performance characteristics reflect the auxiliary peripheral chips used on each board rather than the performance of the core logic chipset.

GigE throughput is pretty close, with the Gigabyte board holding a small advantage in CPU utilization. Keep in mind that we're talking about the utilization of two completely different processors.

The Gigabyte 780G board's Texas Instruments Firewire chip proves much faster than the VIA controller on the Asus G35 board. Burst and sustained read speeds aren't even close between the two boards.

RightMark Audio Analyzer favors the Asus board, although only slightly. A poor showing by the Gigabyte in RMAA's noise level and dynamic range tests drags down its overall score.