MSI B85M ECO Review: Aiming Green at $73
by Ian Cutress on November 26, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- MSI
- B85
- ECO
MSI B85M ECO In The Box
Nothing immediately springs to mind as an interesting extra when discussing low powered motherboards. Any special feature we might usually consider with high-end consumer facing products will either use power or increase the cost of the package. In a similar vein, as there is no multi-GPU support for B85, no SLI/Crossfire bridges are needed. As another incentive to MSI to keep the package light is that if the target market of this motherboard is more in the office PC-under-the-desk scenario, extras will not necessarily be wanted beyond a pair of SATA cables.
In the box we get:
Driver DVD
Manuals
Rear IO Shield
Two SATA Cables
As expected, this keeps the costs down.
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU and a Corsair H80i CLC.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.
Test Setup
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-4770K ES 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.5 GHz (3.9 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboard | MSI B85M ECO |
| Cooling | Cooler Master Nepton 140XL |
| Power Supply | Rosewill SilentNight 500W Platinum Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsZ 2x4 GB DDR3-1600 |
| Video Cards | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA Drivers 337 |
| Hard Drive | OCZ Vertex 3 256GB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
| USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
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Jaaap - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
For these ECO boards it would be very interesting to get and idle power for a setup without external videocard.Jaaap - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Arg i should read better: 21W minimumklagermkii - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Thanks for showing separate idle and load power usage in the review and not just delta.bill.rookard - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
The area I think where this would do fairly well would be as a SMB server. I know I tend to keep things for far longer than 5 years which would be the break even point on the cost - once they have something that works, and works well (and works correctly) they'll leave it in place until it dies, and for something as simple as file serving, you just want something durable and reliable.mike_m_ekim - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Another great use is a HTPC. My HTPC uses a 35-watt haswell CPU. Passive cooling isn't an option because of location, so fans are required. Another 10 watt reduction in system heat would allow the fans to run just a little slower, making my nearly silent PC even quieter.mike_m_ekim - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
One other thing, my HTPC is on 24/7 and transcoding almost all the time. I would see a $25 savings in electricity over 3 years, and an HTPC should be able to last much longer (because it's just an appliance). The cost savings would be secondary (noise being the biggest factor).MrSpadge - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
My PC is number-crunching 24/7, so saving 12 W would save me about 6€/year (yeah, no fracking in Germany). A Z97 ECO could be interesting, because even with massive undervolting to ~1.0 V, current Intel CPUs are still asking to be OC'ed to ~4.0 GHz. I couldn't do that with a B chipset.DanNeely - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Is your math right? Your cost saving number seems low. For 24/7/365 operation a 1W load corresponds to 8.76 kwh/year; at an electricity price of 11.5 cents per kwh (reasonably close for most of the US) it works out as a dollar per wattyear or $12/year savings. My understanding is that German electric prices are several times higher, and am wondering if you lost a zero in your calculations.Jaaap - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
You're right. One WattYear is approx 2 euro.MrSpadge - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
8.76 kWh for 11.5 US-ct -> 1 W = 1 $/year in the US8.76 kWh for 23 EUR-ct -> 1 W = 2 €/year in Germany
... the cost is higher over here, but not an order of magnitude :)