Power-Consumption:
The biggest surprise was the energy hunger of this DDR3 board, even with WLAN and PCI GbLAN disabled it suck more power than the DDR2 counterpart. It seems the 8-phase VRM is very inefficient. In idle-mode it sucks up to 27-45W more than MSI P35 Platinum. When running full load (gaming with 3D), this insane numbers stabilize lower at 16-25W. Of couse most of the time the computer runs in idle-mode. Global warming is problem of our time, but ASUS seems not to care a bit.