EVGA Z87 Stinger Review

Overclocking

The EFI isn't quite as slick as your typical ROG or MSI Gaming types, but its colour scheme and layout were generally fine for extensive tweaking sessions with no lagging or other quirks to report and the same going for recovery too. There's the option to use offset or absolute voltages with our only complaints - small ones at that - being that many options are spread over several pages, such as memory speed and timings. Apart from this there's little to dislike and we were quickly sitting at the desktop with the CPU running happily at 4.7GHz and 1.27V.

Of course, we're not ones to leave it there and, to our amazement, the Z87 Stinger booted at 4.8GHz with CPU thermals still under control in Prime95. However, it kept failing our video editing test, even ramping up the vcore to 1.3V. We eventually settled on 1.25V at 4.7GHz - one of the best results we've seen, particularly with the temperatures. Given a few more hours tweaking and maybe the addition of a beefier cooling system than our Corsair H80i, even better results are definitely on the cards from this superb overclocking motherboard.



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