Power Consumption and Temperatures

With the Bitspower cooler installed, the ASRock X299E-ITX/ac does really well in the cooling department. I'm actually quite impressed by the weird-looking chipset cooler doing so well, and of course, the board's VRMs barely even get hot. The cooler keeps any of the CPUs this board supports super-cool as well, so it should come as no surprise. What's even more impressive is the low power use and really modest voltages needed with current ASRock X299 boards compared to other brands. ASRock's Digital VRM design really works well, so much so that they might have the best motherboard VRMs for both the Z370 and X299 platforms bar none.

In stock format, with that cooler pictured above on the board's VRM (shown with the front add-in card removed so you can see it better), the board's VRM can get quite toasty. That would be a problem normally, but it seems to me as though ASRock really intends for you to use water-cooling and this full-cover block with this motherboard. With the socket so tightly closed in on with these add-in cards on either side and the PCIe slot on the bottom, the room for a lot of "traditional" air coolers just isn't there anyway, and if you use a rather mundane AIO like I normally do to test boards, there will not be a lot of airflow over the board's VRM cooler at all, partly due to the AIO design and partly by the board's design; that add-in card with the front-panel goodies and SATA ports blocks most lateral airflow your case may provide.

I know what you are thinking... yes, you do have to use water-cooling with this board if you plan to overclock, and you do have to use a full-cover block. Some of you may not be prepared to accept that, but given what this board is (a mITX HEDT X299 board), I personally don't see that as an issue. If you want such a specialized product, you are going to need specialized cooling. You could get away with using air-cooling, but if you do go down that road, you are going to need to take special steps to make sure the entire board is cooled properly, such as by adding additional fans to the board itself (which basically any X299 board right now needs when overclocking, anyway).

I do have to mention, however, that when it comes to overclock testing, ASRock X299 boards automatically set the input voltage to 2.1V, up from the stock 1.8V or so (this voltage value actually varies from CPU to CPU at stock), which affects load temperatures in a very negative way. If you buy one of ASRock's current X299 boards, you do need to pay attention to this voltage value (I have made a point of mentioning this in every review of their X299 boards) or it will affect the success of your overclocking venture, especially on these Intel HCC (High Core Count) CPUs. That said, the above numbers do reflect me manually setting this voltage back to 1.8V while overclocking because that is all my CPUs seem to require.

It is also worth noting that once you start to broach the 300W mark, the ASRock X299E-ITX/ac, even with a full-cover waterblock, can run pretty toasty. Pushing the max clock on my 7980XE up to 4.4 GHz on all 18 cores easily has power use jump over 300W, and I saw temperatures in the range of 60 °C on the VRM area, with some hot spots reaching 70 °C or so. The default cooler would nearly melt under such a load, so if you plan on getting this board to overclock with, you best be buying that full-cover block too. Now, given it seems as though ASRock has sent this cooler to all the reviewers that got a board sample, it really seems as though this board is truly meant to be used with this Bitspower cooler, especially if you plan on using an HCC CPU. Personally, I think it's pretty amazing that this 7-phase VRM was capable of maintaining those clocks with no throttle and while staying stable. There are full-size boards that cannot do this.