ASUS Sabertooth Z87 motherboard review

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Power Consumption

Power Consumption

In an IDLE state, a PC (Z87 / 4770K / 16GB memory / GeForce GTX 580 / SSD) consumes roughly 57 Watts. Keep in mind that we measure the ENTIRE PC, not just the processor's power consumption. When we place load on the CPU and we see the power draw rise.


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Now more interesting is to remove the graphics card and to see how it behaves then. As shown in the chart above only the embedded IGP is used, the power consumption is great. In IDLE we measured ~57 Watts and, with processor load, 134 Watts for the entire PC. 

So I want to make it very clear that power consumption measurements will differ per PC and setup. Your attached components use power but your motherboard can also have additional ICs installed like an audio controller, LUCID chips, network controllers, extra SATA controllers, extra USB controllers, and so on. These parts all consume power, so this is an indication.

Next to that, we stress all CPU cores 100% and thus show a PEAK power consumption. Unless you transcode video with the right software your overall/average power consumption will be much lower.
 

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These are pretty high temperatures, considering we are using a heavy duty Noctua cooler. As you can see all Turbo's have been configured at 3900 MHz. A lot of manufacturers do this, and that's giving them a 5% boost (on average) over the reference kit.

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