Test Setup


Benchmarks


Other Software


Overclocking

Since the introduction of Z87 back in 2013, there has been a return to BCLK overclocking. This type of functionality ensures flexibility for Overclockers compared to previous generations were the BCLK was locked to 100MHz and only the ratio could be adjusted. As many of you will know, Haswell CPUs get very hot with little voltage increase therefore the flexibility and headroom for overclocking can be limited. For the Z97 launch, we are testing with the Intel Core i7-4770K which from previous, extensive testing, has a maximum overclock of 4.6GHz.

Since 4.8GHz is the maximum overclock for 4790K our investigation takes us to trying to achieve this or a reasonably close achievement. Whilst we could boot into Windows with 4.8GHz, we encountered problems when the system was fully loaded so we began dropping the frequency with the voltage at around 1.43v. Once again, 4.7GHz gave us similar results – the temperatures with 1.43v were entering the 90C region – something to be regarded as an absolute maximum for the longevity of the chip. So we eventually settled at 4.6GHz with the voltage just over the 1.4v mark. This result gave us reasonable temperatures and can be regarded as a notable achievement.