Premium "Gaming" Motherboards - Are They Worth it? ATX vs ITX Z87 Test
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,011 words · ~5 min read
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the Corsair carbide air 540 high airflow cube case is great for air cooling or
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liquid cooling check the link in the video description to learn more now we
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were inspired by tiny tom logan so you
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can check out his youtube channel time to live customs uh tiny tom logan's
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review of the maxima 6's stream from ASUS and the reason we were inspired by
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it was because he had the
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or whatever the word is for it to basically come out and say yes this is a
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fully featured board and it has all the bells and whistles but who gives two
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shakes of a lamb's tail because it doesn't actually affect performance in a
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way that reflects the extra money you spent on it so we actually were
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inundated with requests to take tiny tom logan's conclusion that something like
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an extreme grade board or yeah extreme grade board is not necessarily a great
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value for the money and put it into practical terms where we actually test
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it so we took the maximus 6 extreme which is a z87 motherboard designed for
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hardcore tuning and tweaking liquid nitrogen overclocking it comes with the
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oc panel which allows you to make hardware adjustments to pretty much
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anything you want without even going into the BIOS very very high grade board and we took
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the least expensive z87 mini itx motherboard that we could find
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which was the Gigabyte z87 and wi-fi and we put them head-to-head we were able to
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achieve the same overclock on both of them because neither slick nor i are
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really extreme overclockers to the point where we're playing around with
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tertiary memory sub timings nothing like that that's where you're going to
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squeeze a little bit of extra performance out of an extreme grade board so we've got the same overclock of
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4.7 gigahertz on both of these platforms actually i'm going to take you right
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over here for a minute we're going to have a look at the test platform so you can see that we were running our vertex
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loser vertex fours right yep we were running our vertex four test drives we
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were running a 4770k a gtx 780 as well as of course our h100
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cooler of course our ax850 power supply and that is pretty much it we only ran a
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couple games and we're looking at this from a gaming perspective although it should be noted that slight differences
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in gaming performance will also reflect slight differences in other performance
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because the only variable we changed was the motherboard that was it so
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performance wise i'm going to chuck a couple of graphs up here so you guys can
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have a look at these and that should give you some idea of about what you can
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expect so it's anywhere from around two to five percent from going from sort of
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the most bare bones board that we could all the way to the most extreme board
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that we could and the thing about this is that i don't want this to be um
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sort of discouraging if you really want a high-end board there are still
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benefits so for example high-end boards such as the maximus 6 formula in
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particular i think is a great example of a high-end board that delivers
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compelling value it has much better on-board audio than most of the other
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boards out there on the market it has a better lan solution than a non-gaming
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oriented board something like color scheme is
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very important to many gamers many tweakers many system builders who are
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really into the looks of their machines and you do get all of those things with
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a high grade board that you don't get with an entry level board i don't know
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where this board is i think slick told me it was here somewhere but i don't
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know where it disappeared to however don't expect to get some kind of crazy
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performance benefit from going with a higher end motherboard another example
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of where you'll get a benefit with the maximus 6 extreme is obviously expansion
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so this particular board only has about four SATA ports it's got a single pci
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express 16x slot with the maximus 64 extreme i think i said formula before
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whatever the extreme you get four-way crosswire cross wire
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my wires got crossed four-way crossfire four-way sli you get all of that stuff
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that most people will probably never do but if you're one of those people who
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really feels like they need the option for that stuff i personally don't
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because i will never go four-way crossfire or four-way sli in fact i
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don't recommend it at all if so if you're one of those people who feels like they need that then you have
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the option as well thank you slick for fixing my upside down nyan cat which was
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hopefully serving to spice things up in the background a little bit if you
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weren't fascinated by the content so in conclusion guys
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does buying a gaming motherboard actually yield higher FPS in many cases
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no you have to look at it in terms of does the value proposition of that
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higher end board make sense for you or is it something you don't really care
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about thank you for checking out this whatever this was online as tech tips
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comment if you feel the need to express some other kind of sentiment about the
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video so for example if you are completely disappointed that
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this nyan cat does not in fact have a rainbow tail
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which i was disappointed to discover when it arrived then let us know that
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too
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you