Test System

Initial Setup

Initial boot-up with the EVGA Z87 Stinger was quick and simple, and installing device drivers off the CD was quick and painless. There is not a lot for me to say here because everything worked exactly as expected, and I noticed that the EVGA Z87 Stinger, unlike many other products I have tested recently, runs with a normal Turbo profile.

Some boards have custom Turbo profiles that boost performance at "stock" settings, giving the appearance of having more performance than they really do. A boosted Turbo profile becomes available on some products when XMP is enabled or, at other times, through a switch in the BIOS. EVGA's current Z87 Stinger BIOS does not use such a profile by default. I personally feel that a coupon for Intel's Performance Tuning Protection Plan should be included in the box to protect against CPU failures if boards use a Turbo profile without giving the end user a way to turn it off or don't explicitly state doing so. For more information on Intel's Performance Tuning Protection Plan, check their site found HERE.



EVGA took some pretty decent steps to ensure that first-time-assembly with the Z87 Stinger is as easy as can be, with several guides stuck to the board itself getting in the way of you mounting your parts, which makes these tips hard to ignore. The sticker on the CPU socket is actually a foldout with multiple layers for step-by-step instructions.


1, 2, 3, and 4 later and your CPU is mounted and the cooler is in place – easy. But those DIMMs...yeah, EVGA recommends you use sticks with less than 1.65V operating voltage. I guess I am not the only one that reads Intel's literature. :p


Once I installed the EVGA Z87 Stinger into my Bitfenix Prodigy, I checked all cables for cable management and was happy to see that even with the vanity plate over the rear I/O section, there was plenty of room for the front panel audio port cables to pass by as the low-profile capacitors toward the back of the PCIe slot ensure that none interfere with your VGA. It also seems as though that I/O cover might direct some additional airflow over the VRM cooler, which helps in keeping things cool while you push your hand-picked Haswell CPU to the limit. Plugging stuff into the rear of the assembled rig was pretty straightforward, too, with clear labels and color-codes making finding the right port to plug your stuff into pretty simple, even if you are colorblind.

Power Consumption

We measure CPU power consumption since one of our first tasks is to truly verify system stability. I isolate the power coming through the 8-pin ATX connector using an in-line meter that provides voltage and current readings, and total wattage passed through. While this may not prove to isolate the CPU power draw in all instances, it does serve as a good indicator of board efficiency and effective VRM design. Total system power consumption is no longer reported as this figure can change depending on what VGA is installed. The sole board-only power measurements possible without physically modifying a motherboard are those taken via the 8-pin CPU connector, making it the only figure of value worth reporting. I use wPrime with eight threads selected in the options since it provides a consistently high workload throughout the full length of the test and runs long enough for the VRM and CPU to produce a fair bit of heat. Most average workloads will draw far less than this, although distributed computing applications are quite similar. This is not supposed to test stability since I use several other applications to do so, but merely to provide repeatable power draw numbers that anyone can replicate. The meter used is an off-the-shelf Zalman unit that has been on the market for some time. It provides quite similar results in my test environment when compared with a FLUKE 337 clamp meter.


The EVGA Z87 Stinger's power consumption numbers were normal at stock, definitely on par with boards that are much larger and have much more room for efficient VRM builds. When overclocked, however, power consumption was nearly 30 watts higher than what I usually see. That is roughly 20%, which is a lot to me.