Power Consumption and Temperatures

With the test bench update, I have also overhauled my temperature measurement methodology. For measurement, I now use a Reed SD-947 4 channel Data Logging Thermometer paired with four Omega Engineering SA1 Self Adhesive Thermocouple probes. One probe directly touches the chipset and two are placed on select power stages. The last probe actively logs the ambient temperature.


For the ASUS Prime X299 Edition 30, two probes are spaced out evenly to segment the top Vcore power stages into thirds. A probe is left out to log the ambient temperature. All temperatures are presented as Delta-T normalized to 20 °C, which is the measured temperature minus the ambient temperature plus 20 °C. The end result accounts for variation in ambient temperature (including changes over the course of a test) while presenting the data as if the ambient were a steady 20 °C for easy presentation. Additionally, there is no longer any direct airflow over the VRM with this new setup, placing extra strain on the VRM cooling.

For the numbers seen in the chart above, I use wPrime for both temperature and power draw. However, relatively short tests do not put enough strain on the system to get a look at how the VRM performs at the limit, so I added an additional test to try to thermally abuse Vcore as much as possible. It involves a 30 minute Prime95 run at the maximum overclock the motherboard can maintain, again with no airflow over the VRM. The temperatures are logged every second, and the two probes are then averaged for a cleaner presentation before subtracting the ambient to calculate the Delta-T. The results are charted below.


While the ASUS Prime X299 Edition 30 got pretty warm in my torture test, passing the 80 °C mark, there are two considerations: first, unlike most testing I do, I actually have the most power-hungry CPU available for the board. Second, the heatsink fan was left in its default configuration, which is by no means aggressive.

Given this is the most strenuous load this VRM is ever likely to see outside of exotic cooling overclocking, I am confident in the capacity of the ASUS Prime X299 Edition 30 to handle any overclock in any climate.