High-End Intel Z87 Motherboard Shootout
Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking
Temperature
Despite its VRM heatsink with active cooling, the ECS board had the highest operating temperature of 43 degrees Celsius recorded. Even its chipset heatsink recorded a high of 45 degrees Celsius. In addition, the Gigabyte board was the other one whose VRM temperature, under load, was above 40 degrees Celsius. The other boards' recorded VRM temperatures were below 40 degrees Celsius, with an average value of 34.6 degrees Celsius. MSI's Z87 MPower Max was among the coolest operating boards under load, along with ASRock Z87 OC Formula.
Power Consumption
MSI turned out to have the lowest power draw during idle and load operations, followed by the Gigabyte board. ASUS with its truckload of features and ICs enabling the extra functions naturally consumed a little more power than the rest of the boards.
Overclocking
In our attempts to overclock the current Intel Z87 boards, we set the CPU base clock at 100MHz (for obvious reasons that it's pretty much futile to mess with this base clock), and adjusted their CPU Core Ratios accordingly to achieve the best possible CPU overclock. At the same time, we also tweaked the different voltage CPU and DRAM settings in order to achieve a stable overclocked state as listed out on the test setup page.
Model | Maximum CPU Core Ratio Achieved |
Maximum Overclock Achieved |
ASRock Z87 OC Formula | 45 | 4.5GHz |
ASUS Maximus VI Extreme | 48 | 4.8GHz |
ECS Gank Domination Z87H3-A2X Golden | 43 | 4.3GHz |
Gigabyte Z87X-OC | 47 | 4.7GHz |
MSI Z87 MPower Max | 46 | 4.6GHz |
To ensure the clock speeds weren't just for show, we used Cinebench 11.5 scores to determine the gains from overclocking, and it was the ASUS Maximus VI Extreme that led the pack with its almost 30% performance boost!