Power Consumption and Temperatures

Intel's X299 platform is a true HEDT platform for everyday consumers this time around, and as such, it is very important that a board is capable of meeting the cooling needs of any user, and some boards do fail at that. Some boards, in order to control that, limit overall power consumption to under 300W, while some others go even lower. With up to 18 cores and 38 threads pushing AVX loads all at once, power use can skyrocket to that 300W mark just under stock clocks, never mind with multicore enhancement enabled or after overclocking even beyond that. It has been a little while, but board CPU VRM cooling is of the utmost importance for users who use these crazy HCC CPUs. Fortunately, the ASRock X299 PROFESSIONAL GAMING i9 XE is purposefully designed to meet the needs of such a user, and with its dual 8-pin EPS CPU power connectors along with a huge heatsink, it is ready to push the limits, but a fan should be added to the board to cool the VRM heatsinks if you are really going to push the limits, although for most, CPU cooling will be a limit first. The 13-phase VRM section is pretty efficient in my books and handles high loads pretty well, but you do want to make sure you have a good power supply to feed it as those dual 8-pin connectors can only do so much.