Gigabyte Z87X OC Overclocking Motherboard Review

As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  The effective overclock for these tests is 4.9GHz @ 47x multiplier and 104 BLCK.  We had to change the cooling method for this overclock to something a little colder than ambient air temp, in fact it took the Single Stage Chiller to run at these speeds.  The results are show below.

When overclocking it is important to find a "sweet spot" where the performance curve tops out and still remains stable with a reasonable amount of heat production.  With this system we found that the 4770K runs HOT and by hot we mean extremely warm over previous Ivy and Sandy bridge processors.  Most of this heat can be attributed to the smaller CPU die and difficulty with heat transfer but can also be attributed to the onboard voltage regulator that is now part of the CPU.  These things combined has made Haswell heat bound meaning that short of extreme cooling our overclocks will be limited.

Overclocking the GA- Z87X-OC was pretty straight forward and can be done in a variety of ways.  For those familiar with the Gigabyte UEFI you can manually set frequencies and voltage or you can select any number of "auto up" options that will automagically overclock your system  The important thing to note with any Haswell based overclocking is to "know your processor". 

For our tests the only way to run 4.9Ghz was by putting the whole system on the Single Stage Phase Cooler and after some trial and error we finally had a stable system.  The sad part of the whole process was that even though the phasehead was below zero the processor core temp was around 20c under load.