ASUS Intel Z68 ROG Maximus IV Motherboard Reviews

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 identical power supplies, Solid-Sate Drives, Memory kits and motherboards from the same company. 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 other test scenarios, we decided to 3DMark Vantage the performance preset and took the maximum power consumption during the first GPU test.

Benchmark Results: It’s not exactly a surprise that the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z drew more power than the Maximus IV Gene-Z. After all the Maximus IV Extreme-Z is an eATX motherboard, while the Maximus IV Gene-Z is a micro-ATX motherboard. At idle the Maximus IV Extreme-Z pulled 100 Watts at the wall, while the Gene-Z pulled only 80 Watts. Loading up the CPU, the Extreme-Z pulled 170 Watts versus the 148 Watts of the Gene-Z. The largest difference between the boards is under 3DMark 11. The Extreme-Z pulled 232 Watts while the Gene-Z pulled 200 Watts.