Power Consumption and Temperatures

The Gigabyte X670E AORUS Master has two heatsinks for the VRM that are connected via a heatpipe. These are stacks of closely aligned fins, which has better thermal dissipation compared to a big chunk of metal. However, through observation these types of heatsinks often need more static pressure for peak efficiency. The backplate of the motherboard also has thermal pads right underneath the VRM, providing extra thermal dissipation.




For the Gigabyte X670E AORUS Master thermal testing, one probe is placed along each bank of power stages. A probe is left out to log the ambient temperature. For temperature measurement, a Reed SD-947 4 channel Data Logging Thermometer is used, paired with four Omega Engineering SA1 self adhesive thermal couple probes. All temperatures are presented as Delta-T, which is the recorded temperature minus the ambient temperature as a base. The end result accounts for variation in ambient temperature, including changes over the course of a test.

Tests are conducted over a 30 minute period. For testing, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is used in a stock configuration. For the first 5-8 minutes, a fan is placed on the VRM heatsinks to simulate case airflow. If the heatsink has a internal fan, it is not disabled for these tests.


Since the Ryzen 7950X is thermally limited, overclocking was unnecessary here to show how well the VRM heatsink can handle a full load for an extended period of time. After the fan is removed around the 5 minute mark, VRM temps steadily increased until the end of the 30 minute test, nearing 65 °C. Well within the acceptable limits and shows that this motherboard can handle current or future AM5 CPUs.


The second test was to see how the VRM heatsink may fare in games. Temperatures quickly shot up after removing the fan, but started to slow down around the 10 minute mark. Overall, if gaming is the goal here, it shouldn't be any concern that this motherboard is incapable of handling the power load. Quite the opposite in fact.