MSI Z97 Gaming 7 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review
Ryan Martin / 10 years ago
Power Consumption and Thermals
Power Consumption
To measure power consumption we use a killawatt meter and measure the total system power draw at the wall. We run three different use-case scenarios for 5 minutes and take the average reading.
Thermal Performance
To measure the thermal properties of each motherboard we take the temperature of three different locations using a Rosewill infrared thermometer. We measure the hottest point on the PCH (chipset) heatsink, the first VRM heatsink (which is closest to the rear I/O) and the second VRM heatsink (which is closest to the RAM lanes).