How We Test
So hopefully that’s given you some food for thought on what board may be right for you in terms of design, features and that all-important price, but there are other areas that are worth looking at, but before we do, it’s worth talking about the test configuration which consisted of the Ryzen 9 7900X processor, as at the time of testing, the 7950X wasn’t available to us. Memory-wise, we used Corsair’s Dominator Platinum DDR5 32GB 5200MHz memory and for the GPU, we used the Inno3D RTX 4090 iChill X3. Everything was housed inside the NZXT H7 Flow case with an NZXT Z73 RGB for consistency with the stock fan configuration of a single 120mm fan in the front and the same in the rear, while the Z73 is installed at the top with its triple fan setup. We made sure that our room was at 24 degrees +/- 1 degree throughout our testing, as sadly we don’t have air conditioning to keep it any cooler, and then for our readings, we used the Akozon 4-channel K-type thermocouple thermometer for VRM temperatures which were fixed to the rear of the boards and reported the peak temperature. Along with this, for power measurements, we used the GW-Instek GPM8212 AC Power Meter for the very best accuracy. Also for our power and VRM testing, we used Prime95 for a prolonged amount of time to put as much stress under the CPU for a somewhat worst-case scenario type test.
