ECS Z170 Claymore Motherboard Review

Power Consumption & Chipset Temperatures

Using a reliable P3 Kill-A-Watt meter, we monitored the power consumption of the test system throughout the testing phases. During each test, we made note of the lowest and highest readings, these are the readings we are taking a look at.

Legit Bottom Line: At base clock speeds, the ECS Z170 Claymore was sipping less power than any Z170 motherboard we have tested. While a power difference of 11W might be minor, overtime that can add up, especially if your system is sitting idle a large amount of time. As you should expect, once the system was overclocked, the power consumption jumped from 44W to 68W at idle, a 24W increase in power for the overclocked system. A 42W increase in power between the stock speed and overclock speed was observed once the system was under a load.

CPU Temperatures

The testing environment was kept at a constant 72F (22.2C), we used HardwareMonitor to evaluate the CPU temperature during the testing phase, the highest and lowest reported temperatures are being reported.

Legit Bottom Line: When idle, the Intel i7-6700K was showing a 21.25C with the Corsair AIO cooler running in silent mode. Once the system was under pressure, that jumped to 51.50C, which is still very cool for this processor, however it was slightly higher than we have seen. Of course, once we overclocked the system to 4.7GHz, the load temperature jumped up to 93.50C! That is a very high temperature, and is dangerously hot, I wouldn’t recommend running your system at those temperatures for too long.