Power, Heat, And Efficiency
ASRock’s Z87 Extreme6 saves energy spectacularly, while ECS’ Z87H3-A2X doesn’t appear to idle down completely.
ECS also reflects higher CPU thermal readings, which are explained by its added power consumption.
Performance differences are less than 1% between all platforms, and anyone who’s curious about trivialities will find a very long chart of average performance in this article’s image gallery. Dividing performance differences that small by far larger power differences means we expect an efficiency chart inversely proportional to power consumption. “Average of all systems” is the baseline for our chart, which starts out as 100% and is zeroed out by subtracting 100% from all results.
ASRock's low power consumption gives it the efficiency win!