Haswell Devils Canyon Performance

There are several things to address in this article.  First the Z97I Gaming AC might be small but it packs in features that rival full sized motherboards.  Most of these are designed to enhance gaming performance like the onboard Killer 2000 NIC while others are useful beyond that like the dedicated 8-channel audio with Audio Boost.  For those who don’t know, Audio Boost is a feature that will amplify the audio output so to power higher-end headphones with larger drivers.  These headphones typically are designed to deliver deeper bass and need more power to operate properly.

As was mentioned in our previous review the motherboard is extremely compact and would fit nicely in any case from the extremely large In Win S-Frame down to some of the smallest gaming cases like the Silverstone Raven RVZ01 and CyberpowerPC Zeus Mini.  Don’t let the size fool you the Z97 chipset is also designed to allow overclocking and comes with plenty of supporting features like a military grade VRM and very robust set of options in the Gamer UEFI.  One of the features that surprised us most was the “Try It!” memory tweaker that overclocked our 2133Mhz RipjawsX memory modules up to 2600Mhz by simply selecting the option.  As you may have guessed this kind of overclocking can be done manually but it takes longer and can cause issues.

During our testing we decided to compare the performance advantages of the new Core i7 4790K over the older Core i7 4770K.  As you may have guessed the performance of the 4790K is about what you would get if you overclocked a 4770K.  The new TIM was one of the performance advantages and we are happy to report that temperatures are lower than before but still quite high considering that this is an 88W TDP processor.  Thermal transfer is difficult to test since our Core i7 4770K has been de-lidded and already cools better than it did stock.

Overclocking is a big part of this website and no processor evaluation would be complete without some OC scores to look at.  Our main concern was to see if overclocking a Core i7 4770K was faster than the 4790K with Turbo enabled.  The charts showed obvious performance gains and while we actually expected more considering the faster CPU and memory clocks the results are exactly where they should be.

Overall we really liked using the Z97I Gaming AC, the board was easy to setup, the layout was good and it was able to overclock quite well.  This is saying a lot considering that most products configured for gaming focus on user experience rather than raw performance.  Of course the small form factor works well given that many gaming rigs are now powerful enough to only need a single video card.  Your choice in processor will depend largely on budget and if you go with a K series you can easily extend that budget with some light overclocking,  Of course buying the best to get the best is always a good options and the Core i7 4790K is an excellent step in getting you there.