KitGuru Annual Awards 2013

As we move away from the components section of KitGuru's Annual Awards 2013, we wanted to look back at products which showed a particular level of Technical Excellence.

Products which innovated to create an offering that stood out among its peers. The Asus 4K monitor is one such product, as is the Palit GTX 780 Ti Jet Stream, but there was one product that impressed everyone who saw it.

What makes it more impressive, is when you consider the manufacturer's humble beginnings. When Asrock was formed in 2002, Asus had already been a global leader in the mainboard market for 13 years.

When Asrock began, it was focused almost entirely on the budget market, but the focus changed in 2010 as it became a lot closer with Pegatron, the manufacturing operation that had its origins in 2007 – when it was spun off from Asustek.

That's the background, the history, but what of the present?

In August 2013, following a huge number of Z87 mainboard reviews, KitGuru Labs took delivery of a very special mainboard. Seeing the Asrock Z87 OC Formula up close was like staring at the business end of an SR-71. You're left in little doubt about its purpose.

Ultimate performance.

We learned that several memory companies were using this mainboard to see just how good their modules were. Basically, as soon as it launched, it was being used as the reference point for serious memory overclocking.

Using the fastest commercially available memory kit at the time, we cranked the Asus Maximus VI Extreme to the limit and got 3,240MHz.

Using the same memory in the Asrock Z87 OC Formula, we managed to squeeze out an additional 48MHz. It doesn't sound like much. But it was faster than the best board available from the biggest component manufacturer on the planet. Now that's saying something.

Our conclusion then was “The ASRock Z87 OC Formula is a well-priced, feature-heavy, high-performance motherboard that has a number of worthwhile tweaking features and excellent overclocking potential. Just make sure you go for the WiFi-equipped version at no extra cost”.

When manufacturers claimed to have produced the fastest memory on the planet, we tested those claims on the Asrock Z87 OC Formula board. It became our reference point for high end DDR3 testing.

You can read our review, over here.

Our conclusion today is that the Asrock Z87 OC Formula mainboard is our choice for the very first KitGuru Technical Excellence Award.

You can buy from Overclockers UK, from this link.

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