Power Consumption and Temperatures

The Gigabyte Z690I AORUS Ultra Plus DDR4 uses two heatsinks connected via a heatpipe. Due to the limited available space, there isn't much room to expand in horizontal length or width. Gigabyte overcame this thermal constraint by increasing the height of the VRM heatsinks, therefore increasing surface area. With an abundance of fins, thermal dissipation is great, even with minimal airflow. The backplate mainly acts as PCB support, but also has two thermal pads behind the two VRM sections to provide extra passive cooling.


For the Gigabyte Z690I AORUS Ultra Plus DDR4, one probe is placed along each bank of power stages. A probe is left out to log the ambient temperature. For temperature measurement, I use a Reed SD-947 4 channel Data Logging Thermometer 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.

Prime95 is used for prompting maximum power consumption over a 30 minute period. For testing, I used an Intel Core i7-12700K set to 5.0 GHz and locked at 1.35 V to draw 300-320 watts for this test. Other tests are conducted with an Intel Core i9-12900K in its stock configurations. 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.


These VRM tests are split into multiple charts to give a wider understanding of the cooling prowess of the Z690I AORUS Ultra Plus DDR4. Prime95 is in many ways designed to be a brutal torture test. It is a fairly unrealistic daily use case. Even with this unrealistic power draw, the VRM heatsinks did the job well, for such a small area. It rivals many full size heatsinks, which is saying a lot. One area Gigabyte has consistently done well in, is in thermal testing.

By midway through the test, thermal readings start to plateau, landing in the higher 80s. Certainly not the best I've seen, but even the smallest amount of case airflow will see these temperatures drastically drop. For example, just from opening the office door mid test to leave the room, we can see a 6 °C drop.


Next up was to see how well the board does with an i9 12900K, without changing any BIOS settings, for a stock configuration. After the fan is removed, temps quickly shoot up, but taper off at the half way mark only going up and down based on the room temperature. 70 °C is a perfectly acceptable value, for long periods of time.


The final test was to see how the VRM heatsink may fare in games. It is interesting to see how efficient the heatsinks are in real-time, as temperatures rapidly change based on the CPU load. VRM Temperatures eventually even out near the end of the 30 minute test.