ASUS Z87-A or Gigabyte GA-Z87X-(U)D3H

subnorman

Honorable
Aug 25, 2013
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Hi guys!
I am looking for a motherboard to go with my i5 4670k and after researching I came up with these 2 options. I chose these because they have 8 power phases instead of 4 of the cheaper ones, which will give better overclocking performance. So I wanted to ask you which one is better. For now I am only going to use 1 graphic card and 1 HDD, so a lot of SATA ports aren't necessary. For now I will just do a slight overclock with stock cooling, but may buy H100 water cooler in the future, to get higher overclocks.

Also, I wanted to know which is the difference between Z87X-D3H and the slightly pricier UD3H, and what improvements can it give to my preformance.

Thanks in advance! :)

PS: Other motherboard suggestions are also accepted.
 
ANY Z87 based motherboard will perform about the same and give you decent conservative overclocks.
I would pick the less expensive motherboard and spend the savings elsewhere.
How high you can overclock haswell is primarily determined by your luck with getting a good chip. 4.0-4.4 is a realistic expectation.
Once voltage gets past the 1.25v level, heat increases dramatically, and no amount of cooling(excepting LN2) makes much of a difference.

A liquid cooler or a $85 noctua air cooler might give you .2 more than a $30 cm hyper212.

I do not much like all in one liquid coolers when a good air cooler can do the job.
A liquid cooler will be expensive, noisy, less reliable, and will not cool any better
in a well ventilated case.
Liquid cooling is really air cooling, it just puts the heat exchange in a different place.
The orientation of the radiator will cause a problem.
If you orient it to take in cool air from the outside, you will cool the cpu better, but the hot air then circulates inside the case heating up the graphics card and motherboard.
If you orient it to exhaust(which I think is better) , then your cpu cooling will be less effective because it uses pre heated case air.
And... I have read too many tales of woe when a liquid cooler leaks.
google "H100 leak"