Biostar Gaming Z97X Review

Overclocking

As you can read below, the EFI isn't the easiest to work with but the main settings are presented clearly and we didn't have any issues finding the limits.

We didn't quite manage 4.8GHz, which we've seen with most other Z97 motherboards, but leaving the 0.5MHz base clock boost intact and using a multiplier of x47, the resulting frequency of 4.724GHz is well beyond what we'd recommend using on a 24/7 overclock anyway.

This was on the ragged edge, though, and while the system was perfectly stable using Prime95's Small FFT test, the temperatures were in the low nineties, even with a comparatively low vcore of 1.24V. Still, if 4.5GHz or thereabouts is your target, then CPU-depending of course, the Gaming Z97X will cope well.

EFI

Even the likes of ASRock and Gigabyte struggle when it comes to producing a clear and modern EFI and while Biostar has certainly made an effort, it's not a particularly clean one, with the graphics appearing somewhat pixellated. It feels rather basic, especially when stood next to an Asus ROG EFI, which can be had on the similarly-priced Maximus VII Ranger.