EVGA Z77 FTW Intel Z77 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 EVGA Z77 FTW has an idle power consumption of 73 Watts. That puts it right in the middle of the pack when looking at the idle power consumption. Once we loaded up the CPU with Prime 95 large FFT’s, the EVGA Z77 FTW was the third lowest power hungry motherboard. Under a full CPU load, the EVGA Z77 FTW was pulling only 148 Watts at the wall. Only 13 Watts more that the lowest board, and an impressive 31 Watts lower than the GIGABYTE G1 Sniper 3!