What's the difference between motherboards using the same chipset?

kwyjibo · 14 Oct 2014 at 10:16

I'm looking at the Gigabyte Z97P-D3 for £62 and I always wondered if there is a significant difference in performance between this and the Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming G1 which costs £327?

Or is it just the latter has more extras like slots, ports, wifi, etc included?

I also get that for SLI or Crossfire the latter is better because both PCI slots are x16 but for one graphics card will the cheaper Z97P-D3 do fine?

pastymuncher · 14 Oct 2014 at 10:53

You got it bang on in your second line, extra slots, wi-fi, more power phases, better audio, more options in the bios that will never be used etc.

Overclocking wise a £100 board will overclock just as well as one costing 2-3 times as much unless using LN2 and extreme voltages because Haswell is a poor clocker and the limiting factor.

Personally I don't see the point of these expensive boards and if spending that much it would be better spent on X99. Saying that I would also never go with the cheapest board available. They are cheap for a reason and have less power phases and can be extremely limited when it comes to overclocking options. The sweet spot are the boards around the £100 mark from the likes of Asus and Gigabyte.

kwyjibo · 14 Oct 2014 at 11:39

Power phases isn't a spec that's usually listed

but since I plan to buy a 4690K instead of a regular 4690 solely to retain the option to overclock, it seems better that I go for the mid-price motherboard.

pastymuncher · 14 Oct 2014 at 12:14

A few decent boards around £100-110 are:-

Asus Z97-A
Asus Z97-AR Not seen this board before but seems very similar to the Z97-A. It's also on offer at the moment.
Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 3
Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 5 Comes with a nice looking Gigabyte Aivia K1800 gaming keyboard worth £48.

Klunt Bumskrint · 15 Oct 2014 at 08:19

pastymuncher said:
Overclocking wise a £100 board will overclock just as well as one costing 2-3 times as much unless using LN2 and extreme voltages because Haswell is a poor clocker and the limiting factor.

I totally disagree with this. Higher priced/better boards are nearly always more stable than cheaper boards hence clock better.

pastymuncher · 15 Oct 2014 at 20:44

Any other cpu I would agree but not with Haswell. My 4690K easily does 4.4Ghz (probably more as I just wanted to prove it could be done) on the wifes Gigabyte B85M-D3H, a board I only paid £48 for!!