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Z97-A Firmware

Intel Z97 Express: Five Enthusiast Motherboards, £115 to £130
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Asus completely revamps its UEFI GUI in the Z97-A, though it contains the same settings as the firm’s previous firmware generation. The menu still starts with two overclocking options, Manual or XMP, where XMP actually means “manual with XMP enabled”.

Unless you're using a K-series CPU, overclocking is limited to a handful of 100 MHz speed bins over stock. So, we reverted to our Core i7-4770K to test it. That CPU reaches its full-load thermal threshold at 1.25 volts, which we achieved using the board's 1.245 V setting. That's the sort of correlation we like to see.

It seems that everyone cheats on memory voltage to maximize DRAM stability. Our voltmeter showed the target 1.65 to 1.66 volts at the board’s 1.62 V setting, even though the board’s volt meter reported only 1.63 volts.

Occasionally informative, the little information box at the bottom of this GUI version also makes us scroll through an extra page of settings—compared to Asus’ previous GUI—to reveal its full set of primary, secondary, and tertiary memory settings.

Two additional submenus provide voltage stability techniques to protect your overclock, and power-limiting settings to protect your CPU from your overclock. Asus told us last year that its defaults are best-suited to the majority of hardware, and so we follow that guidance.

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    Putolev , 14 May 2014 09:28
    Sorry to say but this "review" didn't bring anything worthwile to me at all. If you take a certain price range and compare the products found there, they ought to be quite similar, right? Well then there's no surprise if no great differences are to be found. Like the reviewer stated, the features make the difference between like the great deal with Gamecaster (which has no value to me at all).
    What I found lacking is the reviewing of those features like software (audio, fan control etc.), VRM quality, "other stuff".
    Now what is this "other stuff" really? Which motherboard has the best "other stuff"? I didn't get it from the review.
    Apart from the very simple introduction to the software and hardware, I can't really make what's better between Gigabyte and MSI, the one's I'm interested in. MSI has better UEFI, I understood but how is the software? How many VRM phases and their quality? Is MSI's audio suite better than GB's?
    These are what make the products apart in the same price range but finding the value leader with good explanations for why was not possible from this article despite it's title.