MSI Z97I GAMING AC (Intel LGA 1150) Review 35

MSI Z97I GAMING AC (Intel LGA 1150) Review

BIOS Walkthrough »

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 that, 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 anyone can replicate. The meter used is an off-the-shelf Zalman unit that has been on the market for some time. It provides similar results in my test environment when compared with a FLUKE 337 clamp meter.

Load ConditionCPU VoltageRing voltageIdle PowerLoad Power
Stock Clocks1.034 V0.868 V6W68W
Overclocked1.285 V1.150 V8W129W

The MSI Z97I GAMING produced very good power consumption results at both idle and load. I was pretty impressed that its BIOS profiling had my overclock idling as though stock settings were used, which only lead to a slight increase in power consumed, which was most likely due to higher cache and memory speeds. The small 2 W difference between stock and overclocked makes pushing higher CPU speeds where the power is needed a real possibility; it's just a matter of getting a decently clocking "K"-SKU Haswell chip.

Fan Control


Fan control on the MSI Z97I GAMING is pretty good. A fairly intuitive graphical interface in the BIOS provides customizable multi-point fan curves you can independently set for both fan headers, with a range of 12.5% - 100%.
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Nov 29th, 2024 08:34 EST change timezone

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