least power hungry / coolest Z790 motherboards?

[gardening]

Trying to find the least power hungry and also the coolest parts for a new PC, in especially in idle and for light office work, temps also important to me during gaming

= the PC should act rather extreme eco friendly during the times it is not used for gaming, preferably also during light gaming

 

the reviews for Z790 DDR5 mobos seem to either not include all of those details or its always only the same few motherboards getting reviewed.

 

Not interested into Asus nor Gigabyte this time around, beside the Aorus Master only getting 55°C temps for the 

 

For the moment ASRock, MSI and EVGA seem to be good in general, I do not know anything about other options

 

Originally I picked an ASRock Z790 Taichi, but according Tom‘s Hardware its too power hungry in ‚default‘ & gets rather hot too.

No idea if that could be solved with changing the setting e.g. undervolting.

 

The MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WiFi gets 76°C hot, means 21° hotter than the Aorus, I hope for a cooler board (according to a PC magazine in my country)

 

I am hoping to get a mobo with a stable software showing the temps too, read somewhere the Steel Legend does not show all the temps I am interested in?

not sure if it will be an i913900K or an i713700K, probably it will be the latter

 

Temps: CPU and the .. using a translation software for that one: voltage converters for the vrams?

 

 

 

 

 

[johnt]

I'm confused about your needs. In general, the motherboard power consumption and heat generation are dwarfed by the CPU and GPU. In your case with the 13900k or 13700k, your conditions won't be any different. I am also confused about why you want to avoid ASUS or Gigabyte... easily cutting your options in half, if not more. I understand why you want components with lower power draw, but you might want to consider different gear completely. You don't want a lower power drawing motherboard with a 13900k. What do you need from such a CPU anyway?

 

If you want to avoid heat generation and whatnot, then get a board that does very little. In fact, a B series board might be better suited for your needs than a Z series. Are the boards you are considering reaching 55 to 70+ C at IDLE??? That seems difficult to accept. Are you sure an i5 isn't enough for your general needs?

 

I have a Z690 mini ITX from ASUS. My motherboard temps as reported from HWinfo64 is 34C at idle and core temperatures are around 28 C on a 12700k. I am using a 240mm AIO and Noctua fans. GPU is sitting around 28 C as well. Ambient temp is 20 C. Power consumption from the CPU is around 30 watts, and the GPU is 12 watts (3070ti).

 

Not sure if my post helps you at all, but I've given you a couple more data points to consider. The 13 series runs hotter than the 12 series from my understanding. You might be better off with the 12 series. I would never game on my PC on a hot day... that's just me... but I would have no issues leaving this beast running all day for light tasks.

[RONOTHAN##]

Just saying, you're way overemphasizing the importance of VRM efficiency here. VRM components are designed to be run at 105C at all time for years of full load, so running it at under 80C (like all high end Z790 boards will run) means that the VRM will outlast everything else on the board. If you actually care about power consumption of the VRMs, that's completely independent of the VRM temperature because a higher power consumption VRM with a better heatsink will run cooler than a more efficient VRM with a worse heatsink. Generally Gigabyte and EVGA have been putting the most effective VRM heatsinks on their high end boards, hence why they are running cooler (though the other manufacturers have been putting heatsinks with more thermal mass, so they'll get to max temp a lot slower, so it'll run cooler in more bursty workloads), but if you compare the actual calculated efficiency between something like a Z790 Carbon and a Z790 Master the difference is 1W either way. Basically it's no difference at all. Heck, the difference between a high end board like the Z790 Carbon and a slightly lower end board like the Z790 Elite is gonna be in the neighborhood of 3-5W under full load (I'm talking Prime95 Small FFTs with a 5.7/4.6GHz OC on a 13900K pulling over 450W), still no difference, and at idle it would just come down to which board has the most aggressive phase shedding setup which is near impossible to test and will result in differences of less than 1W of power.

 

The real difference is just gonna be with how aggressive they are with the voltage curve at stock, but if you're this concerned with power draw, you'll be undervolting anyway so this figure means next to nothing as well. 

[PDifolco]

1 hour ago, gardening said:

Trying to find the least power hungry and also the coolest parts for a new PC, in especially in idle and for light office work, temps also important to me during gaming

= the PC should act rather extreme eco friendly during the times it is not used for gaming, preferably also during light gaming

 

the reviews for Z790 DDR5 mobos seem to either not include all of those details or its always only the same few motherboards getting reviewed.

 

Not interested into Asus nor Gigabyte this time around, beside the Aorus Master only getting 55°C temps for the 

 

For the moment ASRock, MSI and EVGA seem to be good in general, I do not know anything about other options

 

Originally I picked an ASRock Z790 Taichi, but according Tom‘s Hardware its too power hungry in ‚default‘ & gets rather hot too.

No idea if that could be solved with changing the setting e.g. undervolting.

 

The MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WiFi gets 76°C hot, means 21° hotter than the Aorus, I hope for a cooler board (according to a PC magazine in my country)

 

I am hoping to get a mobo with a stable software showing the temps too, read somewhere the Steel Legend does not show all the temps I am interested in?

not sure if it will be an i913900K or an i713700K, probably it will be the latter

 

Temps: CPU and the .. using a translation software for that one: voltage converters for the vrams?

 

 

 

 

 

 

You're very confused about how a PC work, the real power hungry beast is the CPU, esp. a hi end 13700/13900 which can go up to 300W+

Then the board mostly only cleans and distribute power, eating a little and getting hot by electrical resistance

Judging boards and manufacturers on the fact that board X gets hotter than board Y in some situation is plain stupid, a manufacturers can do some very good board on a chipset then way worse one on another, or even on a model vs another on same chipset

 

Rather state what you want to achieve, and if it's power efficiency drop Intel 13th gen first ! And don't tell us you want a 4090 

 

[mariushm]

1 hour ago, gardening said:

Trying to find the least power hungry and also the coolest parts for a new PC, in especially in idle and for light office work, temps also important to me during gaming

= the PC should act rather extreme eco friendly during the times it is not used for gaming, preferably also during light gaming

 

the reviews for Z790 DDR5 mobos seem to either not include all of those details or its always only the same few motherboards getting reviewed.

 

Not interested into Asus nor Gigabyte this time around, beside the Aorus Master only getting 55°C temps for the 

 

For the moment ASRock, MSI and EVGA seem to be good in general, I do not know anything about other options

 

Originally I picked an ASRock Z790 Taichi, but according Tom‘s Hardware its too power hungry in ‚default‘ & gets rather hot too.

No idea if that could be solved with changing the setting e.g. undervolting.

 

The MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WiFi gets 76°C hot, means 21° hotter than the Aorus, I hope for a cooler board (according to a PC magazine in my country)

 

I am hoping to get a mobo with a stable software showing the temps too, read somewhere the Steel Legend does not show all the temps I am interested in?

not sure if it will be an i913900K or an i713700K, probably it will be the latter

 

Temps: CPU and the .. using a translation software for that one: voltage converters for the vrams?

 

Wow you're so confused. 

There's a VRM on the motherboard, which is a circuit which converts 12v from the power supply to the voltage the processor needs to work ... which can vary between let's say 0.6v and 1.4v 

The VRM circuit is made out of multiple phases - think of it like engine cylinders. A VRM may use 8 phases to convert 12v to a lower voltage, while another VRM may use 12-16 phases to convert the same 12v to a lower voltage. 

There are some benefits to having more phases, and there are some benefits to having less phases, it's not always better to have more phases.

Now, each of these phases of the VRM converts 12v to a lower voltage but doesn't do it with 100% efficiency - there are some losses, which show up as heat.

The components that make up those phases are typically rated for 125c or more, so they don't mind running at 100c and there's basically no benefit if they run at 50c or if they run at 70c or 90c

One motherboard could have a oversized heatsink / cooling system on the VRM, keeping it cooler (ex 55c for the Aorus Master) and another motherboard could have a more normal heatsink / cooler for the VRM, which keeps the temperature (ex MSI mpg z790 keeping the vrm at 76c) -  both VRMs may actually have the same efficiency and have the same losses (ex 15 watts lost as heat when processor is consuming 200w), but the Aorus Master spreads those 15 watts over a much larger surface on more fins on the heatsink, so the temperature will show up as lower. 

BUT this doesn't mean the motherboard consumed less power, or that the VRM was more efficient, both motherboards produced 200w for the processor and 15w or whatever was wasted as heat due to conversion losses. 

 

Some motherboards can have some bios settings that block the CPU from requesting too much power, or limit the cpu to some maximums (ex the 13900K could request 300w but a motherboard could refuse to give it more than 250 watts) - that could make that particular motherboard be cooler because conversion losses will be lower so the board will heat less, but at the same time the CPU will boost at higher frequencies on the motherboard that doesn't limit the power consumption to 250w.

 

[gardening]

It seems my self-trained English was not good enough to explain myself clear enough 

 

I seek ‘cool’ motherboards

and

I seek a motherboard, that at least at idle and at simple office work wont consume more power than absolutely needed

 

I did find some reviews mentioning the temps of the ‘converters’, some did mention the power consumption with idle, some only mentioned the power consumptions of the whole system, some did tell eg the CPU temp but not a word about power and vise versa

= my impression is, the details I seek are not always listed, so I try to guess based on little hints

 

It will be used for both, light office work and gaming, sometimes even extremer gaming, also some video work and so on

It should be able to do so with lots of reserves for the future.

Like buying / building only every ~ 10years or so the next one, the PC should be bored for now, so it might not run too powerhungry in the next few years

 

No, not an RTX 4090, but probably a 4080 with FPS cap in normal gaming (majority of the time) and without caps sometimes/seldom whilst gaming at higher levels

 

Heat: the room is under the roof, fully south orientation - means it is already too hot there in summer, not only not nice for the user, but it adds to all the temps. So I’d prefer to pick the most efficient parts (like a titanium PSU) to produce as less ‘heating’ as possible not only for the power saving (?), but also to not heat up the area in summer too (but power is the main reason)

We do not have a climate cooling machine (term?) and never will have one of those, mostly because of avoiding unnecessary power consumption

 

If one motherboard will be able to run in light work like eg 30W and another one needs 50W, I’ll pick the 30W

 

I hope it is clearer now, but thank you for your comments still too

[RONOTHAN##]

4 hours ago, gardening said:

I hope it is clearer now, but thank you for your comments still too

You were just as clear before, just misguided in how this actually works. Board temps only matter if they're overheating, if they aren't it just doesn't matter, and the difference in power consumption between high end boards themselves is 1-2W at absolute peak usage, not 10-20W like you're thinking it is. The VRMs of most boards nowadays are somewhere between 90% and 95% power efficient depending on how much power is going through them and what they're optimized for. That means at idle where the CPU is consuming like 20W, the board's VRM itself is only consuming 1-2W total assuming it's got proper phase shedding. The only difference that will make noticeable changes to system power consumption is what the board will run default voltage at. Some boards will run 10-50mV higher voltages compared to Intels default guidelines, and since power consumption is equal to P=I*V with current is directly proportional to the clock speed run, the higher the voltage the higher the power consumption. That you'll need to find reviews all talking about the exact same CPU as different chips will request different amounts of voltage at stock, or just be undervolting the CPU and make the motherboard's defaults not matter. 

[gardening]

no, I do not think like you assume, at least as I understand it.

 

I do not understand each word of the posts here, technical English was not part of my ‘training’ so I might still misunderstand things.

 

if articles do not state the power consumption in eg idle, office, …, but do point out strongly an over average heatproblem or high over average temps (and in the case of the Taichi even a kind of concern based on its default being way too high) than there is the possibility of the reasons being as good heat-spread, badly designed, cheap materials… and/or it can be based on badly chosen general part details on the motherboard, bad software, …

= as in it needing more power than the actual technology really warrants.

And if 2 motherboards are in general of similar quality / have similar abilities, I’ll pick the one with less overall power consumption need in idle/office work, even if its only 1Watt.

 

How high the actual power standard for z790 or alternatives motherboards are, I do not know, I know it more about what was normal 10y to 20y back, at least then the differences between motherboard details (including their software) was a bit more than like 2 Watt

 

High heat points / at certain positions (no matter which part of the pc) do interest me, not for long lifetime of the parts, but for thinking about how to maybe improve/adjust airflow to support that … region of the motherboard. 

Let it be another case, an additional fan or eg building a custom tube (for air, not water) or… depends on temps or position.