- Back to homepage
- Related articles
  Related articles

Gigabyte mITX Z87N-WIFI Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1150 by leeghoofd @ 2014-02-21

That small doesn't always imply slow or less strong has been shown by the ASUS Maximus VI Impact board. Setting several records with an Intel's Haswell CPU in the socket, the little mITX board has proven it has nothing to fear from its normal sized brethren, however the biggest drawback is the insane price tag, which makes it far less interesting for those that want to build a HTPC or mini gaming PC on a budget. The market has evolved in favor of the mATX and mITX platforms; demands for small yet powerful mini PCs is drastically increasing. Gigabyte's Z87N-WIFI is a perfect example that including Intel's flagship Z87 chipset does not necessarily imply an exuberantly elevated price, however is a high end chipset a requirement for most users out there? Time to unravel some of the myths and start to explore the wonderful world of the Gigabyte Z87N-WiFi mITX.

Stock 3D Results

Time to verify the efficiency of the Gigabyte Z87N-WiFi board under 3D. As expected not much to see as the Radeon HD7970 card takes most of the credit here, while the Z87 chipset is faster in the 2D memory intensive department than the H81 chipset; this due to the possibility to select 2133MHz and higher memory dividers. For 3D with a discrete graphics card, in general we can conclude that from 1600MHz on there's hardly any gain noticeable.

However if you intend to use the onboard iGPU of the Haswell CPUs, than the difference between the H81 and Z87 chipset will become more apparent. The HD4600 integrated GPU of the i7-4770K processor benefits from every bit of RAM MHz you throw at it. We did not re-test this finding specifically on the mITX Gigabyte board, though are basing our statement on the massive tests conducted during the Haswell launch article. The tested memory speeds were:

1600MHz C8-8-8-24
2133MHz C9-11-10-27
2400MHz C10-12-12-31
2933MHz C11-14-14-31

Below are some extracts of the memory divider tests, more memory MHz is better :)

No comments available.

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.