EVGA Z68 FTW Motherboard Review

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: The power consumption of the EVGA Z68 FTW was lower across the board than the rest of our systems today. This could partially be attributed to our Intel Core i7 2600K having only four cores plus Intel Hyper-threading while our AMD FX-8150 has eight cores and the Intel Core i7 970 and the second generation Intel Core i7 3960X both feature six cores plus Hyper-threading. At Idle the EVGA Z68 FTW was pulling only 84 Watts while the highest draw that we saw with the EVGA Z68 FTW was 208 Watts in 3DMark 11.