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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.

OCing Tests 2D

Time to give these boards a run for their money on air. Instead of bumping up the CPU multiplier to 45X, we set the Rams at 2800MHz C11-13-13-31 2T and tighten the secondary and tertiary timings to put some extra stress on the IMC too.

i7-4770K@4500MHz
CORSAIR 2800C11-13-13-31 2T (tweaked)

Why just 4500MHz ? Well our retail CPU is not comparable with all the Intel ES CPUs we see popping up on most websites. What's the idea behind that anyway ? Telling people 5GHz daily can be done at 1.25Vcore... Great for you , but your readers will be so utterly dissapointed if their CPU can't even reach 4500MHz at 1.3Vcore. Maybe with one out of 100 retails you can manage the same speeds as the ES version. Our i7-4770K retail is very average in voltage (1.2Vcore), however just gets too hot at anything over 4600MHz.

Now why do you spot two MSI XPOWER results. Basicly to show our readers what is going on behind the scenes if decent feedback has been given to the BIOS engineers. The 11A results are based on a test Bios ( this is pre beta ) and already give us great hopes that the board could match the competitors performance in future releases. Take note that the final conclusion is solely based on the official bios, not on this test bios !

The MSI XPOWER with the 1.19bios is terribly inefficient, A11 bios will give the MSI fans some hope. Yet there's still along way to go as 3 secs are still needed to put the XPOWER on the heels of the rivals. The ASRock Z87OC Formula just outpacing the Gigabyte Z87X OC board. Bandwidth wise, everything looks okay, however the latencies of the RAM and the Level 3 cache were far too low for the MSI mainboard. Close call looking at these numbers.

PhotoworXX is highly RAM dependant and again neck to neck between the ASRock and Gigabyte boards, no surprise to see the XPOWER trailing again.

Below is a snippit from our testing which clearly shows the differences between the official 1.19 XPOWER bios and the test A11 version. Again very weird that hardly anybody spotted these issues for the MSI board...

good job MSI , but there's still a lot to work on !

CPU wise it's all pretty close in Cinebench R11 64bit, OpenGL shows the XPOWER is again loosing ground. Similar tale for both the encoding tests.

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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