So now that we have covered the design and features of the Asus Z87-Expert it is time to dive into how well the board performs. Asus has always been a company that talks up the performance that their products are capable of and, from our initial look, we can understand this. Asus is one of the companies that drives the market in terms of how to build a motherboard and the components used to squeeze as much performance as possible out of them. So with that in mind let’s just how well the Z87-Expert does perform when on the bench.
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. Once again Asus has always been a leader in overclocking methods, components and in providing boards that have the potential to push your CPU and memory to their limits. For us pushing the Intel Core i7 4770k was not too hard and we are happy with the final results that we got on the 4770k. We did not need to use too much voltage to get there which is always a good thing. You can check out the CPUz validation below.
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 provides a nice suite of board management and overclocking tools in their AISuite. Over the years they have improved them quite a bit and now they form a single program with multiple APIs running under the same hood. The tools, like the UEFI BIOS have improved in responsiveness and also in what they provide to the end users. As there are far too many to cover with pictures and text we thought a video would do the new AISuite justice much better.
