ASRock Z77E-ITX Mini ITX Motherboard Review

ASRock Z77E-ITX System Power Consumption

Since power consumption is a big deal these days, we ran some simple power consumption tests on our test beds. The systems ran with the power supplies, case fans, video cards and hard drives. To measure idle usage, we ran the system at idle for one hour on the desktop with no screen saver and took the measurement. For load measurements, Prime95’s in-place large FFT’s were run on all cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load for maximum power consumption and heat. Curious about real world scenarios, we decided to drop Furmark and ran 3DMark 11 on the performance preset and took the maximum power consumption during the first GPU test.

Benchmark Results: While all of our systems are sitting idle, they all draw a comparable amount of power. The ASRock Z77E-ITX was pulling 61 Watts at the wall, while others were pulling 60-61 Watts as well. Once we started putting a load on the system the ASRock Z77E-ITX performance started to pull ahead. Under a CPU load with the AIDA64 system stability test the ASRock Z77E-ITX was pulling only 121 Watts. While gaming in Battlefield 3 the entire system was pulling only 229 Watts. Each of these performances was 6 Watts lower than the next board.