iBuyPower Noctis Intel Z97 Review

Ryan Leiserowitz / 10 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The iBuyPower Noctis Z97 is $1530 for the model we reviewed, which is quite a deal for such a capable gaming system. All the components are top notch items. The system sits well bellow the $2,000 mark that we were trying to stay under which opens up the opportunity to modify the build a bit and still stay under that mark.

For those who will want to expand the storage a bit I would recommend the “512GB Apotop S3C SSD + 2TB 7200RPM HARD DRIVE” option for an additional $219, bringing the system total to $1,749. This option would give you plenty of space to install games and applications and more than enough room for whatever media you need to store. To squeeze out a bit more performance from the memory you could also step up to 16GB of DDR3 2133 for an additional $30, bringing the total to $1,779. This would give you some extra bandwidth and memory performance, which would help with your apps and games that respond well to faster memory.

The iBuyPower System that we reviewed can be purchased and customized here.

Overview

In the benchmarks, we can see that the iBuyPower Noctis Z97 has more than enough performance to power through. The system edges out a X99 system in 3DMark and Tomb Raider likely because of the applications favoring GPU power. The EVGA Superclocked GTX 980 was cruising along at 1505 core and 3505 memory while doing these benchmarks, and that was a stock settings. The GTX 980 would still have plenty of headroom for overclocking if the user was interested in taking the time to do that.

The stock 4-core, 8-thread 4790K is clocked at 4GHz but has turbo up to 4.4GHz, so it has plenty of power for CPU focused tasks as you can see in Cinebench where it easily outperforms an overclocked 4-core 4690K. When going through these intense benchmarks the all-in-one 120mm liquid cooler does a good job at cooling the CPU while being a lot more quiet than one would have expected. In some benchmarks such as Super Pi we see that the system is trailing a bit, and that is very likely due to the DDR3-1600 since it is giving us a bit lower bandwidth. As stated earlier the easy remedy for this is choosing the DDR3 2133 for an additional $30, as it would definitely give users a boost in bandwidth.

Overall this system performed very well and when gaming, allwoing to turn up the eye candy. Our sample system came with Windows 8.1 installed on it and I personally think that for a bit more performance and ease of use as a desktop system Windows 7 would be a far better choice. This is a personal opinion though as some really do like so of the newer features that Windows 8 has to offer.

With 5 120mm fans installed in the system the components remained very cool and there wasn’t an issue with temps or getting enough air to the GPU. The fans were always near their lowest settings and the loudest part is the GTX 980 when it is being taxed in benchmarks. It is worth noting that the EVGA Superclocked GTX 980’s reference blower type cooler will be a bit louder than most GPUs that employ custom coolers. Even when testing Prime 95 and the Unigine Valley benchmark at the same time the system was only hitting 45 dB. At that level, I don’t find it disturbing at all, especially when I have headphones on while gaming or listening to music.

I found through my testing that this is a great system for the gamer who is looking for the best bang for their buck component-wise. The CPU and GPU are both very fast and will come in handy when playing games that require a bit more power, or playing older or less demanding games at very high frame rates. The new Noctis case that iBuypower has is ideal because of the great looks, ease of access, great cable management features, and plenty of room to expand. The case doesn’t have an optical drive bay which makes the front of the cases look even better, and it really isn’t a problem. I have not needed an optical drive in my systems for years, and if you do want one an external portable Blu-Ray burner is very affordable. The case will also be accommodating with any future upgrades users may want to do – from drives to graphics cards there is plenty of room for adding in items with the Noctis case.

Pros