Five Z87 Motherboards Under $220, Reviewed

Test Settings And Benchmarks

Many critics said this would never happen, but I was able to keep this Core i7-4770K sample well-under 100° Celsius at 4.7 GHz using nothing more than an ancient Thermalright MUX-120. Perhaps the cool room helped, or perhaps Thermalright rigged this particular sample by filling its heat pipes with unobtanium?

After trying every memory sample in the lab, the only set I found that defaulted to DDR3-1600 CAS 9 was an old pair of G.Skill’s DDR3-2200. Since some boards automatically turn on “Enhanced Turbo” when XMP is enabled, I avoided that technology in benchmarks.

The old RAM couldn’t push beyond the overclocking capabilities of the Shark Bay platform, though. For that we secured a new set of DDR3-3000 that, unfortunately, defaults to DDR3-1333 prior to enabling XMP.

Corsair warns that some power supplies won’t wake up from C7 suspend mode, and tells us that’s why it's disabled on many motherboards. I didn’t have time to test every power supply in the lab, so I took the company's advice as an opportunity. The AX860i is, after all, an 80 PLUS Platinum-rated part.

Due to tight scheduling and the need to provide additional hardware and software details, we skipped the individually-tested games and reserved benchmarks to our batch-process applications suite. Apparently, Chris sees me and the batch process for getting these stories done. ;)