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Trio of Z87 OC Motherboards Tested

Motherboards/Intel S1150 by leeghoofd @ 2013-07-26

Today we will be looking at 3 high end Overclock optimized mainboards for Intel's 4th generation processors. Madshrimps received the Z87-OC Formula sample from ASRock, the Gigabyte Z87X-OC and MSI's Z87 XPOWER flagship. Three boards, although all listed in total different price categories, targeted specifically at the enthusiast crowd. Fully equipped to squeeze the last MHz out of your Haswell. Due to the specific nature of these particular boards we have adapted the review method slightly to go more into the efficiency aspect instead of listing all of the onboard features/chips.

Stock Test Methodology

Especially since the release of Sandy Bridge, Intel's first socket 1155, most hardware vendors are no longer respecting the Intel specifications regarding the Turbo policy. Most were imposing the same Turbo ratio to all the cores instead. This makes the lives of us the reviewers even harder as we needed to adapt our reviewing method. With Haswell nothing has really changed, however finding it very weird that some other hardware websites list they are using out of the box boards with no Bios alterations whatsoever besides loading the usual XMP profile. There are big differences between some brands dear reviewers.

For our stock tests we go out of the box and just go into the Bios and load the XMP profile for our 16GB Dual channel CORSAIR Vengeance Pro kit. Audio and LAN ports are disabled too.

The hardware setup comprises out of:

Intel i7-4770K cooled by Scythe Mugen 4
Intel DZ87KLT Mainboard
ASRock OC Formula ( 1.51 bios )
Gigabyte Z87X-OC ( F5v bios)
MSI Z87 XPOWER ( 1.19 bios )
16GB CORSAIR Vengeance Pro 2400C10 Dual Channel kit
ATI HD7970 GPU
CORSAIR AX1200 PSU
Western Digital Green Caviar 1TB HDD

As you will notice we have used the latest Bioses to date of writing. In particular ASRock and MSI corrected some reported glitches the community discovered during the weeks of testing these boards.

Here are some shots of our ready to be thrased boards:

Comment from Teemto @ 2013/07/26

Really like the editor's note

Comment from NordWolfe @ 2013/08/03

Finally somebody with the balls to tell it like it is. Now I would just like somebody to call-out Intel, for their woeful/unacceptable manufacturing quality control on their CPUs, and AMD, for their incompetence that permits these abuses from their rivals. At least, so it seems, AMD is now hiring the right people for their CPU division. Hope this pays off quickly so that Intel loses it’s arrogance, and total lack of respect for it’s customers. For that to happen we need many more true reviewers, such as yourself, and not Corporate Whores, such as we see in most sites, and youtube channels.
I salute your courage, integrity, and the knowledge you have on your mission.
Cheers.

Comment from leeghoofd @ 2013/08/04

Thx guys for the feedback. It's not what the manufacturers or people from the PR team want to read, but at least it's the truth based on hard facts... apreciated that my hard works is applauded

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