Power Consumption and Temperatures

The ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero uses a single heatsink that spans across both VRM sections. It also has multiple layers of fins for better thermal dissipation with minimum airflow. Paired with 90 A power stages, the power delivery system is more than capable of handling most overclocks outside of those extreme LN2 numbers, which wouldn't work anyway as the LN2 pot will take issue with the capacitors around the LGA 1700 Socket.



For temperature measurement, I 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 ROG Maximus Z690 Hero, one probe is placed along each bank of power stages. 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 direct airflow over the VRM for the first five minutes, after which the fan is removed. This gives an idea of what to expect with and without moderate case airflow.

AIDA64 is used for maximum power consumption over a 30 minute period, as a substitution for the standard Prime95 stress test that did not load all the cores. For testing, I used an Intel Core i7-12700K set to 5.1 GHz and locked at 1.45 V. 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.


The ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero did well in the VRM torture test thanks to the 90 A power stages and a thick heatsink covering the VRM. With a fan directly on the VRM section, section 1 tapers off around 40 °C due to the fan being closer to the top portion where the second probe is located. Once the fan was removed after 5 minutes, temperatures slowly rose until the torture test was over. Overall, it was tapering off around 60 °C and only increasing from there on out as the room temperature increased.

While overclocking the Alder Lake CPU is a new endeavor, I think the used voltages and Load-Line Calibration of 4 are suitable for a real-world use case. I also set the switching frequency to 800 kHz as that is the maximum within the BIOS. Overall, I am pleased with the results as I do not think anyone will struggle to moderately overclock any Alder Lake CPU using this motherboard.