Intel DZ87KL-75K Review - A Last Hurrah

Overclocking

There are several ways to overclock LGA1150 motherboards; the EFI, the manufacturers own overclocking tools or Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU). The latter is bundled with and works on most LGA1155 motherboards we've tested and will likely give you the tweaking power to max out most CPUs from the convenience of the desktop. We actually found overclocking the DZ87KL-75K was easier using the XTU due to the overly simplistic nature of the overclocking section in the EFI.

We found that like Asus' Maximus VI Extreme, the DZ87KL-75K was happy to overclock our Core i7-4770K to 4.4GHz without any manual voltage adjustment. From here on in though, we had to mix it up a little, mainly due to our CPU getting decidedly toasty. We eventually settled on 4.7GHz using 1.257V and a 47x multiplier, but our CPU was only just under its thermal limit at 98°C. Any lower on the voltage and we'd be met with a BSOD when stress testing.


Performance Analysis

We've only got one other board at present to compare with (that will change very shortly) and it just happens to be Asus' Maximus VI Extreme. No pressure then. Predictably the DZ87KL-75K was slightly slower in our Media Benchmarks, but the biggest loss was in the multi-tasking test where it was nearly 80 points adrift. Preliminary testing we've done on other boards showed similar low scores in this test and we haven't identified the issue yet. Overall, though, there was only a 40 point difference at stock speed, with minuscule differences in the other tests including game tests and SATA 6Gbps tests, although its average frame rate in The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim was noticeably slower.

Once overclocked it was more competitive, and actually bettered the Asus board in the video encoding test, but despite sporting an identical overclock, it still lagged behind by 58 points in our Media Benchmarks. If you have a SATA 6Gbps SSD, as per usual you'll want to hook this up to the ports running off the Z87 chipset and not the Marvel 88SE9172 controller, which was significantly slower.


Conclusion

At time of writing we didn't have a firm price for the DZ87KL-75K and nor was it on sale so in a rare event for us we won't be concluding in our usual style or offering any scores. If the situation changes then we will of course update this review. Judging by various reports it's possible it may never be on sale but assuming that if and when it does it's the right side of £150, then it might be worth considering.

It has a great layout, looks good and has plenty of useful features while it kept up with the monstrous Asus Maximus VI Extreme with the cooling we had on offer. The EFI isn't the best we've used, but Intel's XTU meant this wasn't an issue. It's shame that there won't be any future desktop motherboards from Intel, especially as there are so few players in the motherboard market these days. In any event, this is by far Intel's best motherboard to date and certainly one to be proud of.