Intel’s Kaby Lake CPUs are finally available and meanwhile there is even whole lot of suitable Z270 motherboards available. Although the Z270 motherboards are basically a refresh it appears that some vendors are still dealing with issues every there and there. Our friends over at Gamersnexus for example have spotted some abnormal behavior regarding CPU temperatures.
According to their review not all the Z270 motherboards are automatically providing the same core voltage to the CPU. The guys have actually tested an Intel i7-7700K CPU on a MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon and compared the results gathered when running the same CPU on a Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 motherboard. In the case of the CPU cooler they’ve used a NZXT Kraken X62 all-in-one cooler, which also allows for reading out the water temperature.
All the tests have been performed with the same settings which means EIST disabled, Turbo off, all C-States off and a frequency fixed to 4.5GHz. Both pump and fans have been maxed out. Despite we all know that auto vCore is always a pretty conservative setting, meaning the motherboard will drive a rather high voltage through the core, it's interesting to see that between the two motherboards the voltage difference is really not small.
When testing the i7-7700K on the Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 they have reached 94°C and the core voltage was between 1.356v and 1.404v when set to auto, while on the MSI Pro Carbon motherboard the max temperature with vCore on auto as well was 82°C with the voltage moving between 1.28v and 1.32v. This is actually a rather significant difference. Following we compiled all the relevant information for better understanding. Apparently, Gigabyte is already working on a new BIOS version, which should fine-tune the auto setting.
| Gigabyte G7 Auto | MSI Pro Carbon Auto | Gigabyte G7 Manual |
vCore (v) | 1.356-1.404 | 1.280-1.320 | 1.188-1.275 |
CPU Package (C) | 94 | 82 | 70 |
Core 0 (C) | 94 | 82 | 70 |
Core 1 (C) | 91 | 79 | 69 |
Core 2 (C) | 94 | 78 | 70 |
Core 3 (C) | 90 | 76 | 68 |
Ambient Temperature (C) | 21.3 | 21 | 22.2 |
Liquid Temperature (C) | 29 | 28 | 28 |
Package Power (W) | 133-135 Max 138.06 | 101-104 Max 111.28 | 101 Max 115.15 |
Source:
Gamersnexus