ASRock Z97 Pro 3 Review

Overclocking

We're always a bit wary of gunning for a maximum overclock on very cheap motherboards and we'd advise caution about using anything sky high for a 24/7 overclock too. That said, the Z97 Pro 3 has more heatsinks than cheaper models, such as those based on Intel's H97 chipset, so isn't totally adverse to it.

We started by applying our usual 1.28V and started at 4.6GHz with our standard Core i7-4770K. This proved to be fine so we upped the ante to 4.7GHz and then finally at an impressive 4.8GHz. Admittedly here the heatsinks were very hot indeed but it's clear the Z97 Pro 3 lacks nothing in terms of overclocking prowess using traditional cooling. That said, given how hot the heatsinks got, we'd suggest more modest settings such as 4.5GHz would be our absolute limit for a 24/7 system, but can you really complain at £70?

EFI

The EFI is certainly not as snazzy as more expensive boards and looks dated, but it's actually well laid out and has plenty of settings. There's also a real time target display of CPU and memory speeds above the multiplier setting so this isn't a bad place to be if you plan on fine-tuning your system over a few hours.








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