One of the things that makes a board stand out from the crowd, beside features and price, is how well it performs. Even with a massive feature set a board is not going to do well if the performance is not there. With the Z97-I Asus is trying to push the same level of features that you would find in a larger board, but will they be able to get the same level of performance? That is what we are looking to find out today. So without much in the way of ceremony, let’s get into why you are here and see what the Z97-I is hiding inside its small frame. You can also check out our coverage of the design and features of the Z97I Plus.
Overclocking –Overclocking is one of the fun parts of testing motherboards and CPUs (well really almost every component…). As Intel has developed their CPUs and Chipsets overclocking has become easier to accomplish for even a novice. CPUs and motherboards are designed with considerable headroom to allow for extra voltage and to handle the increase in speed. Gigabyte has been making some excellent progress in providing overclocking performance. They have worked hard to build their boards with the right components and trace layouts. This means that there is less potential for performance loss at high speeds due to signal issues. Pushing the Z97I Plus was very simple. We had no issues hitting 4.8GHz on this board and feel we could have gone higher with additional tweaking. The additional voltage options found on this board made it a snap to push our 4770K. We would imagine that you would also have no problems pushing one of the new 4790 CPUs on this board as well. We plan on finding out just how far we can go with this new chip on the Z97I Plus a little later on.
Of course overclocking is a picky subject. I can buy to identical CPUs from the store and they will not always perform the same way under stress. This is the same with motherboards, RAM and GPUs. So again it is important to keep in mind that our results represent a specific hardware configuration. Yours may be similar but will rarely be identical.
Overclocking Tools –Asus’ AISuite has evolved over time to become a very full featured offering. It is designed to give you a single interface for multiple applications and thanks to some fairly good coding the integration of these applications appear seamless to all but the most critical observer. Instead of trying to write about all of the details we walk you through AISuite 3 as it pertains to the Z97I Plus below.
