Gigabyte Z87X UD4H 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 4.5GHz @ 45x multiplier and 100 BLCK.  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-UD4H 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".  Turns out that if you know what it takes to run a processor at a certain speed you can use those settings on just about any motherboard and get the desired result.  Knowing this is also what separates many motherboards from the competition and also why some settings on board (A) may not work on board (B).