ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme Motherboard Review

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: The power consumption of the ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme was a bit higher than the ASUS Z87-Pro. Most of the difference was at at idle where the ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme was pulling 75 Watts at the wall while the ASUS board was pulling 60 Watts. Loading the CPU up with Prime95 the ECS board was pulling 167 Watts while the ASUS was pulling 155. Futuremark Firestrike showed the least difference of our tests as there was only 8 Watts separating the two boards, still the ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme was still pulling more than the ASUS board.