ASUS Z97-Deluxe & Z97-A Review @ OCC
 

"Looking at the baseline performance, I did not see anything terribly out of the ordinary as you might expect. All Z97 boards will perform within a specific envelope when equipped with identical hardware. Overclocking follows this guideline for the most part. Between the Z97-A and Z97-Deluxe NFC & WLC, the maximum overclock was within 21MHz board-to-board, showing that you get the same overclocking experience from top to bottom of the product stack. By manually tuning the Z97-A, I was able to use bclock multiplier overclocking, while the Z97-Deluxe needed a little more finesse and massaging of the bclock to reach its maximum speed of right around 4.7GHz. It took more of a time investment for the maximum clock speed on the Deluxe, but that's part of the allure of overclocking."

http://www.overclockersclub.com/revi...deluxe__z97_a/