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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.

Manual Overclock and Memory Compatibility

Z87 chipset powered boards are tailor made for overclocking the K skew processors. We settled at a moderate 1.35 Vcore in the bios and got a nice 4500MHz CPU speed rock stable. Take note that the Vcore droops/drops so it might be you need to set a slightly higher value then as on other competitor's boards. Below is the OC screenshot with 2 x 8GB of memory installed (no XMP selected).

Memory compatibility test:

The RAM compatibility test is not alike with the Overclocking boards. No PSC, nor BBSE legacy DIMM test here. We just test the high speed kits we have at our disposal at the MadShrimps lab. The PC has to complete a SuperPi 32M and a X264HD encoding run. The Gigabyte Z87N-WiFI had no issues with the memory available in the [M] lab.

CORSAIR 4 x 4GB 2666C10: PASS
CORSAIR 4 x 4GB 2800C11: 2666MHz C11-14-14-35 2T
CORSAIR 2 x 8GB 2400C10 Vengeance Pro: PASS
GeIL Evo Veloce 2 x 8GB 2133C10: PASS
G.SKILL TridentX 2 x 4GB 2400C9: PASS
Kingston Predator 2 x 4GB 2400C11: PASS
Kingston BEAST 2 x 4GB 2400C10: PASS
Kingston BEAST 2 x 8GB 2400C11: PASS

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