Gigabyte GA-Z87X-OC Motherboard Review (w/ Intel i7 4770k)

We always like to use the latest memory when testing a new range of motherboards. With this in mind Corsair very kindly offered to send us 16GB of their Vengeance Pro Series 2,400mhz memory. We will be looking closer at this memory in a dedicated review shortly.

The Corsair Vengeance Pro ships in a colourful package featuring an artistic photograph of the heatspreader, as shown above.

The heatsinks are nicely designed with curved edges and company branding on the sides.

This memory has an XMP profile set at 2,400mhz with 10-12-12-31 timings.

Seasonic also sent us one of their Platinum grade power supplies to use with our system builds today. We recently published a little article on these compatibility concerns over here, with a short excerpt below:

“Intel’s Haswell C6/C7 power states require a minimum load of 0.05A on the 12V2 rail and many current power supplies will fail to provide that low a current. Many older power supply designs comply with ATX 12V V2.3 design guidelines meaning they only call for load of 0.5A on the CPU power rail. This will mean C6 and C7 power states will be disabled in the bios.

Although we have yet to test, there may be cases that the supplies will become unstable when the processors try to enter into these states. Additionally the problems get worse when we factor in that many power supply units do not report minimum currents supported by the 12V2 rail.

From what we hear, the problem may kick in when the CPU enters sleep mode but with a load on the power supply non primary +3.3V and +5V rails. If the load on these rails hits a certain point (different from PSU to PSU) the +12V can go out of spec – voltages greater than 12.6V. If the +12V is out of spec when the system steps out of sleep state the power supply protection may kick in and stop the power supply from running normally. This situation may involve the end user turning the power supply switch off and back on again.

A power supply that uses a DC to DC design for the non primary +3.3V and +5V rails will not have a problem with the new low power sleep states. The reason is based around the DC to DC converter, used to convert +12V to +3.3V and +5V. This design ensures that there will always be load on the +12V regards of the load the CPU places on the power supply.”

Corsair also sent over one of their H100i coolers which we reviewed back in November last year, it is one of the best mainstream ‘all in one' coolers money can buy. You can read our full review over here.

Special thanks to Corsair and Seasonic for outfitting us with much of our partnering equipment for this review today.

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