In for a new gaming motherboard

[Galatian]

Hey guys,

I'm ready to upgrade to Z97 with the upcoming Devil Canyon and I'm unsure about all the marketing on motherboards these days. My PC is solely for gaming (and overclocking if that makes any difference). I used to have a very cheap ASUS mainboard, since I really have only played strategy games, but now that I found myself extremely invested in online shooters, I'd at least like to take the hardware setup on my end out of the question wether I'm "successful" or not.

Things I'm looking for is a good onboard sound, since I just got myself a nice surround system and the Realtek Chip on my Motherboard seems to be the cheapest around and IMHO simply doesn't cut it when it comes to sound quality.

I have a question about the NICs: it seems like MSI and AsRock use Qualcomm Killer NICs, while ASUS has an Intel one (and I believe Gigabyte too). All of them have some sort of software to prioritize packages sent and received. I guess anything is better then the Realtek NIC is have on my board, but is there any advantage on Killer to Intel?

Also I see that AsRock and MSI have a "special" USB port for gaming peripheral, which ups the poll rate to 1000 Hz. I have a Roccat Kone XTD and set the polling rate in the mouse driver to 1000 Hz. Question is: do I need a USB port that actually supports higher polling rates or is this just marketing?

About overclocking potential: I have my Ivy Bridge clocked to 4,4 GHz with offset voltage, but whatever I do, I can't get it stable on anything higher. Might this be because of the cheaper power delivery system or is this simply a sign of chip lottery? Should I invest in a motherboard with a better power delivery system?

Maybe someone can help me with my confusion?

 

[Deders]

I'm going to be looking for an decent board in the Z79 range soon but I'm not going to be making any decisions until they can be tested with overclockable chips to go with them which should be happening around June the 2nd.

It would be interesting to see what the different manufacturer's offer as a sound solution but ultimately I think I will get a sound card as I've never really been convinced by any of the on board solutions yet, no matter how fancy the name is. What motherboard do you have currently?

From what I can tell in the past having killer NIC's has never really translated into much better performance, at least not enough to warrant spending £80+ on a network card. Maybe having them built in might make them more desirable. I believe some of the boards are offering one Intel and one Killer port so you can decide for yourself.

I do like the idea of prioritising packages but the Nvidia implementation on the Nforce boards tended to cause problems and memory leaks. Could have just been a driver issue but I would have thought they would have sorted that out.

I know my Deathadder responds better when I set the mouse to 1000Hz, I'm pretty sure the ports are already capable of this, although I'd like to see it tested to see if there is any difference. It may just be that it gives you the option to do so even if your hardware's software doesn't give you that option. I think it was originally a software registry hack.

As for overclocking, have you tried raising your VTT a little as you increase the core voltage?

 

[Galatian]

I have a ASUS Z77-V LK. Fairly cheap motherboard, but at the time I thought I didn't need more. I did try raising VTT and whatnot, but I'm not even sure if they are of any consequence for offset overclocking (so few guides on that). That being said it didn't help.

It seems to be a reasonable idea to wait out for overclocking potential, but I guess most of the high end boards will preform similar to each other.

I believe the onboard sound made huge improvements. It looks like Gigabyte is using Creatives chips and ASUS is using their own design, so you have both of the best selling sound card manufactures releasing on board sound chips and I would guess that their solutions are at least fairly close to discrete cards.

Unfortunately benchmarks which are actually focusing on those explicit gaming centered features area rare. I see a few tests of the Killer discrete NIC card that they sold a few years ago, which state that their is improvement but it is so little, that they question the high price for the card.

Also what I noticed: I thought SATA
Express and M.2 are specified for up to 2 GB/s bandwidth, but every manufacture seems to only go up to 1 GB/s. So much about future proofing...

 

[Deders]

It's not just the overclocking potential, after reading a few z87 roundups I found there were significant performance differences, some to do with the way different boards handled boost, also some boards performed better when overclocked to the same speed as others. One example was an MSI board (45 or 43) that performed better than the 65 model. I also seem to remember an issue that was prevelent in all the gigabyte boards at the time.

All these are things that were most likely ironed out with UEFI updates but personally I'd like to see reviews of the boards once they have matured a little.

As for sound, the only problem for me with the Recon3D chip on the Gigabyte's is that creative seem to have cut the option to properly upmix a stereo source to surround speakers without applying a pseudo surround effect on it's post X-FI chips. This shouldn't be a problem for stereo speakers or headphones but it's a dealbreaker for me

I'm also wondering why Asus hasn't included its on board sound into the Xonar range, instead calling it crystal. I can't seem to find much on the differences apart from the DB ratings etc which as anyone who knows their audio equipment will tell you doesn't really say a lot about how it performs..

TBH Sata Express and M.2 aren't really factoring into my decision, mainly because the real performance benefit comes from the 4k read and writes. The only time you will see read and writes go much above 150MB/s is if you are copying from one SSD to another. I monitor my disk performance and in real world performance the maximum throughput figures don't really come into play.

Bit of a shame that you have to give up the smaller PCIe ports to use them though.

 

[BadThad]

Overclocking is a crap shoot, you never know what you'll get in the end. If it helps you at all, after a lot of research I just bought the Asus Z97-Pro, best bang for the buck IMO.

 

[Galatian]

I'm still waiting for ASUS to release their full line-up. I feel like I'm the only one who wants many features in one board. It's like you have to decide: do you want gaming features or overclocking? Why can't I have both? And why is the ASRock Extreme 6 the only mainboard with a "proper" M.2 support. I don't need 6 SATA ports nor do I need 8 USB ports. Please just use two more PCIe 2.0 lanes for M.2. It could be so easy. As of right now I'm really thinking of just passing Z97 all together and wait for Skylake. I do want an iGPU in my processor for Quicksync and DDR 4 will probably be prohibitively expensive, so Haswell-E is likely not relevant for me either. Seriously I feel like the Haswell/Broadwell generation is just one big bag of hurt.