Asus Z87i-Pro Review

Overclocking

The Z87i-Pro's EFI is the usual slick and well laid-out affair that we're used to with modern Asus non-ROG or TUF motherboards. The home screen as you can see provides plenty of info including the CPU temperature, which negates the need to hunt for the usual monitor section to check everything's okay. Overclocking was relatively easy, whereby you just set the Core Ratio Limit to 47x and whack the voltage up to the required setting. As you'd expect, the CPU frequency is shown in real time and responds to your tweaking, which is very handy.

Sadly, we weren't able to get things stable at 4.7GHz, which is our current limit with our Core i7-4770K sample. We had to drop to 4.6GHz to get acceptable temperatures, but this did mean we could lower the vcore to 1.175V, where things were much more pleasant, although we did also step up loadline calibration from level one to level three as well.


Performance

At stock speed the Asus Z87i-Pro had plenty to shout about and just managed to pop into the top spot in our image editing test, posting a score nearly 100 points faster than the slowest full-size motherboard on test. Here, anyway, there's little lost by downsizing to mini-ITX.

The same was true in the video encoding test where it placed second, again beating the majority of larger and often more expensive models. We've seen pretty inconsistent results with LGA1150 CPUs in our multi-tasking test and unfortunately the Asus Z87i-Pro came in joint last at stock speed. Thanks to good scores in the previous two tests, it still managed to come mid-table overall.

In our game tests, there was a small but tangible difference between the worst and best motherboards on test and happily, the dinky Z87i-Pro once again proved itself by coming second in both The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Shogun 2: Total War CPU Test. There's certainly nothing to worry about with the SATA 6Gbps speeds either - there are no snail-pace third party controllers here and the Z87 chipset powered its way to similar results compared to the rest of the boards we've tested.

At our maximum overclock of 4.6GHz, the Asus Z87i-Pro was unsurprisingly a tad slower than many of the boards that managed 4.7GHz, where the biggest differences were in the video encoding test. Elsewhere, the differences were negligible and on occasions it was actually slightly faster than higher-overclocked boards. It also managed a stonking multi-tasking score that enabled it to pitch itself respectably overall and also perfomed admirably in our game tests despite the disadvantage in clock speed.


Conclusion

At £146, the Asus Z87i-Pro certainly isn't the best option for a budget mini-ITX gaming rig. In fact, only the Asus Maximus VI Impact holds a higher price tag when it comes to enthusiast mini-ITX motherboards. The competition is far cheaper too, with Gigabyte, ASRock and MSI all offering similar examples for a lot less - we'll be taking a look at these soon.

However, we can't argue about the Asus Z87i-Pro's overclocking ability, features and general ease of use, all of which are exactly what you want with any motherboard. It has enough tweaking on hand to keep overclockers happy, it has on-board WiFi and a whole host of Asus' usual utilities, many of which are very useful. You'll need an external sound card if you're not prepared to put up with the on-board audio, but apart from this, it lacks little compared to its full-size brethren.