The Board

When it comes time to overclock with Haswell, your board choice will play a critical role. Every board maker for this platform has very specific design ideals in mind when designing a product, and the board's list of features and its capabilities are going to weigh heavily into a board's ability to overclock. HOW you plan to overclock should play a part in your board choice.

If you want to play with memory, for example, it is very important to pick a board that has one of its PCIe slots connected to the Intel Z87 PCH. PCIe slots connected to the PCH always run at 100 MHz, which creates a lot of leeway in your BCLK adventures, but this particular element is not important if you simply run a memory's XMP profile. With PCIe slots connected directly to the CPU, the average range of BCLK flexibility is about 4% into either direction, but using a slot connected to the PCH increases flexibility to about 18%, opening up nearly the entire range of possible BCLK frequencies once the new BCLK dividers are included.


If you want a really high long-term overclock, it's best to pick a high-end OC board—the ASUS Maximus VI Extreme, ASUS Maximus VI Formula, Gigabyte Z87 OC Force, or Gigabyte G.1 Sniper5. These boards are designed to run multiple videocards while keeping high long-term CPU clocks, so do not hesitate to pick one of them if that is your goal. They cost more for a reason, even though many other boards seem to perform just as well.

Likewise, each brand now has a cheaper $200 OC board if you plan on running your system with modest clocks for 24/7 use but want the capability to reach those high clocks you see pro benchers hitting. Gigabyte has the Z87X-OC I reviewed a few weeks ago and ASUS has the MAXIMUS VI HERO. Both are new SKUs for those companies. ASRock's Z87 OC Formula is very much a repeat of their past Z77 OC Formula, which was very modestly priced before. ASRock now also has the Z87-OCFM, a mATX OC board similar to ASUS's MAXIMUS IV GENE. All of these products are sitting on my shelf, waiting for their turn on my test bench, and I will have reviews of them up in the coming weeks.

For those looking at modest overclocks, every brand's traditional board line-up is still around, but this time, the differences in features are much larger and more pronounced. If this is where you are heading, you can literally pick a color and find the board to match. There are also several gaming-focused products with high-end audio and LAN capability, like the MSI Z87 GD65 GAMING. Any of these boards are also capable of a decent overclock, but they miss the RAM overclocking support of OC boards, and cooling the VRM may be a priority if you pick a cheaper options.

Most board OEMs recently announced that they have introduced overclocking to the value and business-grade chipsets, H87 and B85, so you could potentially pick one of those products, but that is not a choice I'd make myself, which is why I won't devote any time to that aspect of SKT 1150 overclocking.