TweakTown investigate the power delivery of the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force

With the Ultra Durable™ 5 last year GIGABYTE introduced our new power design using Powerstage controllers and ICs from IR, debuting on our boards like the Z77X-UP7. The clear advantage of using these components was efficiency and good thermals. Simply put they get power to the CPU and memory without producing too much heat, even when you ramp them up and push the performance to the limit.

But it can a tad frustrating for a marketing guy when you try and actually get solid proof of these claims, especially as the vast majority of motherboard reviewers tend to focus on features, price and general performance. To be fair, few reviewers actually have the means to explore heat dissipation and efficiency.

Which was why it’s really great to see Chris Ramsayer of TweakTown dusting off his thermal imaging camera and taking a good hard look at the PWM of our Z87X-OC Force motherboard, one our new Ultra Durable™ 5 Plus boards launched a few months ago. Here’s sample of what he had to say, plus some fascinating images:

“At this point in the test, I'm under the impression that GIGABYTE's new PWM cooler is amazing. With temps like the set we ran we needed to find out what happens when we take the heat sink off.

In the image above, we removed the PWM heat sink and stressed the CPU with performance benchmarks running in a loop. Surprisingly, the warmest IR3550 only reached 45C and a majority of the digital PWM chips hovered right around 40C with am ambient room temperature of 20C.”

Here’s a video Chris shot. Chris explains:

“In the video embedded above, we see the system with and without the heat sink installed. In both cases, we used a timeline for testing with Cinebench 11.5 with the computer shut down and at room temperature to start with. Cinebench starts for the first time at 1 minute and 20 seconds. A new Cinebench CPU run starts every 1 minute and 10 seconds after so at 2 min 30 sec, 3 min 40 sec, 4 min 50 sec and finally at the 6 minute mark. Most of the PWMs reach 40C, but nothing goes over 45C.”