Will disabling I/O ports in BIOS lower power consumption?

[Fjodor2001]

Hi,

I'd like to get a motherboard with lots of I/O options (to be future proof), but I probably won't be using all of them to begin with and I'd like to keep the power consumption as low as possible.

So therefore I wonder: If you have a motherboard with lots of I/O ports (e.g. WLAN, lots of SATA/USB ports, ...), will disabling them in the BIOS lower power consumption? Or does disabling them only mean that they cannot be used, but they will still consume power?

Does anyone know?

 

[ShintaiDK]

No. Maybe there is a tiny tiny difference. But they are still powered on and consume power.

WLAN might be the biggest difference.

 

[Fjodor2001]

Why are they designed like that? Seems like a waste of energy.

If you turn off the WLAN on a Laptop then that interface will not consume any power. Ought to be possible to achieve the same on all I/O interfaces on desktop motherboards...?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

you'd be better off minimizing the amount of fans in your system if you haven't already

 

[greenhawk]

depends on the board design. Some older ones made zero difference as the chips where still powered.

Now days with most of the chip integrated into the chipset, then they will proberly power down correctly when disabled, but the issue is most boards sip the power anyway (20-30W sort of thing last time I checked). And assuming the 100 odd functions of that chip, disabling one (assuming equal power) will save 0.2 watts of power.

As mentioned, better to turn a fan off (5-15W most are) or enable speed control of the fans (so close to 5W most of the time) or even look at under volting the CPU.

As to why you can not save more power, it is known to be a power drawing device that people might not use so it was designed to use very little power.

 

[Fjodor2001]

No. Maybe there is a tiny tiny difference. But they are still powered on and consume power.

WLAN might be the biggest difference.

I just tried disabling BT and WLAN on my ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe motherboard. When measuring the total idle system power consumption at the power cord, it went down from ~34.5 W to ~32.5 W.

So apparently it did work to turn them off in order to reduce power consumption. Only ~2 W less, but still it does work.