GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD5H WiFi & GA-Z77X-UD3H 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 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 consumptions of the GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H WiFi was significantly lower than that of the Z77X-UD3H during the time in Prime95. What we noticed was the Z77X-UD5 runs at 3.5GHz under a full load and the Z77X-UD3H runs at 3.8GHz under a full load. All of the Intel Z77 motherboards had lower power consumption across the board than the ASUS Z68 motherboard though. At Idle, the GIGABYTE Z77X-UD3H was sipping power at only 65 Watts and under the synthetic gaming load it was pulling 192 Watts. The GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H pulled slightly more at idle with 75 Watts, and in 3DMark 11 it pulled a peak of 199 Watts.