Asus Z87-C (Z87) Motherboard Review

As this board doesn’t exactly scream out “POWER”, we didn’t have huge expectations when it came to overclocking due to the single 8-pin power connector to the CPU socket and the not-so-extreme cooling around the VRMs, but alas we did what we do best and went straight into the BIOS to see how far we could push our i7 4770k processor and boy were we in for a surprise.

With our chip, after extensively testing it with a variety of boards, we knew that 4.6GHz was achievable no matter what, and that’s where we started our overclocking journey, and simple raised the multiplier up one notch at a time, while keeping the voltage at 1.375V to see how far things could be pushed without temperatures going to high. 47x was our next step, which was handled with ease and our overclocking stability tests were a breeze, and this was the same for the 48x multiplier, with 100% stability. We then moved onto the 49x multiplier, thinking that it would crash, but to our amazement, this board handled 4.9GHz easily and after more tweaking, we were actually able to claw the voltage back to a respectable 1.360V, meaning that temperatures were even lower and stability was still strong throughout all of our tests, no matter what we threw at it.

In terms of overclocking, this board has blown me away, as I thought 4.7GHz was going to be a bit of a struggle, but 4.9GHz in my eyes was completely out of the question. Now I’m sat here eating my own words, as this board was a bit of a shocker.

We then got even more ambitious and thought that we’d try for 5GHz, and while we managed to boot into Windows and run half of our benchmark tests, 3DMark 11 and Cinebench proved to much for the board, and even at 1.40V, we knew we were beaten and 4.9GHz was our final overclock.