How much difference does motherboard make

[Rob Turbo]

Is it a case of low end boards will never achieve the same results as high end boards, or is it luck of the draw with low end boards and more certainty in high end boards? Aside from that, how much difference will it make?

I was planning an upgrade from my i5 3570k to an i5 8600k until I saw the price of memory, it's not like I need to upgrade, I can wait to see if memory prices come down. Instead I decided to push my current CPU as hard as possible, bought a be quiet! silent loop 280, an aerocool aero 1000 case so I had somewhere to mount the radiator, and some coollaboratory liquid ultra for a delid.

The best I managed before, with a coolermaster 612, was 4.3ghz, around 1.3v, occt temps would sit around 78-80 but one core would get up to 85 occasionally, after swapping to the new case and cooler I've got up to 4.5ghz, 1.42v, occt has the temps sitting around 65-69, max has been 73, still haven't delidded, the 3D printer is just finishing off the delidding tool as I type!

It's not much use to me this time, I'm hardly going to buy another motherboard just to see if I can get a bit extra out of it, but I'm still planning on upgrading, just not right now and it'll probably be an i5 9xxxk or later by that time, but this will still be as relevant then as it is now.

If, for example, I bought an 8600k, a z370 hd3 and a z370 gaming 7, would I likely see a higher overclock in the gaming 7 compared to the hd3, with the exact same processor, memory, psu, etc?

 

[LuckyBenski]

I think there is definitely some truth that "better" boards will overclock higher/more stably. I've certainly seen reviews of boards with quite feeble VRMs struggling to overclock a chip to its known potential. Makes you wonder why a manufacturer would pair poor VRM sections with a Z series chipset.

There's also the fact that while you might get the clocks you want on a cheaper board, those VRMs might be working harder than you'd like, or have less adequate cooling. It's probably on a model-by-model basis rather than individual board variation. I'd look for good in-depth reviews of whichever boards you might consider at the time. I really like KitGuru's reviews.

 

[MasterOC]

Yeah they can absolutely make a difference . there's no absolute guide but its partly down to power delivery and vrm design , party down to pure board design and then down to how well the bios has been implemented and coded . user reviews from power users and major media outlets will help you make a better informed choice . sometimes it will be the difference between between booting at a given frequency and voltage or not and where sometimes its the difference between either a few hundred MHz extra with increased stability or not . even board to board using the same model makes a differencd. Quality even at a miniscule level can vary

 

[Radox-0]

They can make a difference as other mentioned.

There are some elements which can affect other speed metrics. On X99 for example, those boards without the OC pin did not overclock aswell as those with the additional contact pins on the Ringbus / cache. You were hard pressed to hit or go past 4 Ghz on said boards while is was achievable on OC socket boards. Similarly on the memory front some boards may be able to run higher memory speeds then others. This is why you see some boards cut down the number of DIMM slots, usually on the very high end / boards designed with overclocking, as the simplified topology can help with getting higher speed on the memory.