Gigabyte Z87X-OC Review

Test Setup

Gigabyte Z87X-OC
Intel Core i7-4770K
Club3D HD7970 Royal Ace
Corsair Vengeance Pro 2400MHz
Corsair AX1200i
Corsair Neutron GTX
Corsair H100i
Windows 7 x64  

Overclocking

With the first batch of Z87 motherboards we were pushed for time to get them all done by the NDA. With the Maximus Extreme it was too flawed to manage some serious overclocking. So finally we have a combination of time and stability and thus can really see what the limits of our i7-4770K are. With a reasonable low voltage of 1.176v on the CPU we obtained a stable 4.9GHz, which is right up there with anything else we’ve tested. We think it’s probably the limit of our CPU at sensible volts without a combination of de-lidding and utilising a more extreme cooling solution.

For those who’ve been clamouring for the differences that uncore overclocking can make, we’ve increased the uncore from the stock 4GHz to 4.5GHz for our testing today.

Increasing the voltage slightly up to 1.212v got us to the magical 5GHz barrier. We’ll be thermally limited on our H100i at this point, but it’s always fun to try a little further and with the OC Gear on the Z87X-OC we were able to get into Windows at a borderline voltage, and then bump our i7-4770K to 5.1GHz. The highest overclock we’ve seen so far.