Gigabyte Z87X-OC (Z87) Motherboard Review

Taking a look at the type of board we have here and the power delivery to the CPU, we are expecting a lot from this board with some fantastic results, and of course there is only one way to see if the proof is in the pudding. We find ourselves jumping into the BIOS and going into the classic mode to see how far things can be pushed, while keeping the voltage at a reasonable level, and therefore keeping temperatures at suitable levels at both idle and load.

We find ourselves starting with the 46x multiplier and a 100MHz bus speed, leaving us with 4.6GHz to see how things progress from there, and with a voltage of 1.4V we knew that we had a lot more left to go in terms of overclocking potential. We then moved up to the 47x multiplier and found this to be 100% stable and it was very much the same story with the 48x multiplier.

Moving ever closer to the 5GHz mark, 4.9GHz was also 100% stable across our whole benchmark suite, but without stopping there, we found ourselves moving to the magic 50x multiplier and booting into Windows with no issue. Moving through our benchmark suite, we find things to be concrete in terms of stability and we then focused on dropping the voltage down as far as we could while keeping the whole system stable.

We ended up at 5GHz using the 51x multiplier and a core voltage of 1.36V which is remarkably good considering how our CPU has clocked on other boards, showing that the Z87X-OC really does do what it says on the tin and is a true overclocking board.