KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
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.
Gigabyte have this round sown up, that new bios also looks amazing.
Lovely looking motherboard – I am not moving however, waiting on the next generation.
about time they ditched the blue PCB boards- what a step forward ! love it !
this is the board to get, the price looks spot on and its not losing any features.
Only thing is the 6 SATA ports, id like 8 like the asus board, as I have a lot of hard drives.
THE GIGABYTE BOARDS are killer looking. best boards they have ever products.
4770k is a flop. Intel are clearly focused on the mobile platform now and power reduction rather than moving forward in the high end and giving people a huge step up. anyone with a 3770k wont need to move,unless for some reason they need onboard graphics !
disappointing CPU launch, but great motherboards from the guys. I like how they have ditched the old SATA standard now instead of 3 or 4 useless ports for SSD.
4770k isn’t that bad, but I agree, its not a huge step forward. it may help those peoplee who buy a lower end processor and cant afford a graphics card, but who the F*CK will want a 4770k for onboard graphics performance? its irrelevant really.
Ive seen a lot of reviews today and there seems to be a huge variance on the overclocks, which would suggest the new manufacturing process isn’t quite at the level it should be. ill stay with my 3570k for a while longer as its working well with the 7950 I have.
Noob question:
I see you used the 1.65volt corsairs, but the board specifications are for 1.5.volt. Wouldn’t
that impact the lifespan of the board in the long run?
Does the Z87X-OC natively supports the i7-4770k? Or do i need to update the Bios to a newer version? Actually i have a problem since i have just built my new pc but when i try to turn it on the fens start to work but everything shuts down after 1-2 seconds.. I’d like to know if there is an hardware problem or if it’s just because of the bios.
I have no real experience with Bios and stuff like that ç__ç