overwhelming
Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in

Hi-Fi Z87X 3D Firmware

Fast And Cheap? Five Sub-£140 Z87 Motherboards For Enthusiasts
By

Biostar’s O.N.E. menu is now nothing more than a launching point for menus that host actual settings, with one exception: the “Start” page for consecutive UEFI entry can now be set here.

A trend emerges as we continue to migrate our CPU overclock testing from 1.3 V to 1.25 V. Like the two previously-detailed competitors, we reached 4.7 GHz at 1.3 V and 4.6 GHz at 1.25 V.

The Hi-Fi Z87X 3D automatically configures our DDR3-3000 to 30 x 100 MHz, even though Biostar knows that the Haswell-based processor’s integrated memory controller doesn’t support this ratio. When we changed to a 133 MHz base clock, the board automatically switched to a 22x multiplier for a data rate of DDR3-2933. Our XMP-based timings remained.

We were even able to push the memory to 3021 MT/s by increasing the base clock, and without altering the automatically-chosen values for primary, secondary, or tertiary timings.

We’ve been hearing companies bragging about their memory overclocking triumphs at extra-high voltage levels. But we don’t accept marketing as a reason to prematurely kill our hardware. Each board in today’s comparison is manually configured to 1.65 V, and that's a voltage we verify using a volt meter. The Hi-Fi Z87X 3D reached that real voltage at a voltage setting of 1.611 V.

Ask a Category Expert

Create a new thread in the UK Article comments forum about this subject

Example: Notebook, Android, SSD hard drive

Display 2 comments.
This thread is closed for comments
  • 0 Hide
    csjanne , 23 August 2013 14:25
    How to get rid of that awful 'Tech News TV Show' ? It comes screaming in on every page! Most irritating!
  • 0 Hide
    Peciura , 18 November 2013 22:01
    I just bought Asrock z87 Extreme4 mainly because it has all connectors i want and XfastRAM utility. But i was very surprised and disappointed with fan regulation.
    Despite of 6 connectors i had trouble to connect only 4 3-pin case fans because only 2 connectors can control fan speed. 3rd connector has 4 constant levels. Another 2 are PWM connectors and there is no option in UEFI to make them control 3-pin fans. Last connector can supply 12V only.
    So i used Y cable to control 2 identical fans, and set constant speed on hdd cage.