GIGABYTE Z77X-UP7 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: Power consumption was pretty close between the two boards today. There is a little bit more of a difference under the CPU load than I would like to see though. The ASUS P8Z77-V was pulling only 145 Watts at the wall, compared to the GIGABYTE Z77X-UP7 pulling 166 Watts. Idle power consumption was within 1 Watt with the Z77X-UP7 pulling 81 Watts and the ASUS Counterpart pulling 82 Watts. Running 3DMark 11 the GIGABYTE board hit a peak of 218 Watts while the ASUS P8Z77-V pulled 214 Watts.