ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme Motherboard Review

The Legit Reviews Test System

Before we look at the numbers, let’s take a brief look at the test system that was used. All testing was done on a fresh install of Windows 8 Enterprise 64-bit and benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running. We completely overhauled our test setup for the Intel Core i7-4770K processor launch, so we are starting over from scratch when it comes to testing everything. For this review will be comparing Intel Z77, Intel Z87 and AMD FM2 platforms. These platforms are aimed at mainstream users and all feature integrated graphics, so it will be interesting to see how the systems compare. We understand that there is a significant price difference between some of the processors we will be testing, but the platforms are targeted to the same consumer group.

Here is a quick look at the CPU-Z information for our main test system that we’ll be doing the testing on.

The Intel Z87 platform that we used to test the Intel 1150 processors was running the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force was running the latest BIOS version F6f that came out on 6/20/2013. The Corsair Dominator Platnium 8GB 2133MHz memory kit was set to XMP 1.3 memory profile settings, which is 1.5v and 9-11-10-27 2T memory timings. The Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB SSD uses 19nm NAND and was using M310 firmware.

The Intel HD Graphics 4600 that from the Intel Core i7-4770K