GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force Overclocking 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 GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force Power consumption was certainly higher than we would have liked to see. At Idle it was pulling 77 Watts at the wall, 17 Watts more than the next board which was in the same range as the rest of the boards. Loading up the Intel Core i7 4770K in Prime95 with Large FFT’s the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force was pulling 184 Watts, again higher by 17 Watts at the wall. The trend continued in Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike where the Z87X-OC Force was pulling 250 Watts at the wall compared to the next board at 236 Watts at the wall.