Asus Z97i-Plus Review

Overclocking and EFI

With the Z97i-Plus's predecessors doing pretty well in the overclocking department, we were obviously keen to see the same despite the the fact that the Impact is now on the scene and that this board has seen a hefty price drop compared to its forebears too.

With some other boards hitting our Core i7-4770K's maximum overclock of 4.8GHz below 1.28V, out initial attempt at using 1.27V ended in failure after 10 minutes in our Video Encoding test. Thankfully, all that was needed was to bump the vcore up to 1.28V where things remained stable in all our benchmarks and in Prime95's small FFTs test, with no need to touch loadline calibration as we had to do with the Gryphon Z97 recently.

The Z97i-Plus's EFI has a similar look and feel to the Gryphon Z97, although with a slightly tweaked colour scheme. The AI Tweaker section is where the action is at and you get an at-a-glance view of DRAM and CPU frequency on the same page as the multiplier and DRAM frequency settings, with voltages a little further down the page.

No complaints from us here, and combined with good recovery when we didn't apply quite enough voltage, we have no qualms about recommending the Z97i-Plus as a mid-weight overclocking motherboard.








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