GIGABYTE Z87X-OC (Intel Z87) Motherboard Review

Pricing, Availability and Final Thoughts

Coming in at $199.99 at the time of writing, the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC really hits at a much better price point than you'd expect it to. But when you really start to look at the board compared to more expensive ones, you can see why it hasn't got a super high price tag associated with it. As advanced as the Z87X-OC is, it's also quite simple in many ways. It really doesn't move much away from the Z87 chipset itself.

We don't have an extra SATA controller for more SATA ports or eSATA. We don't have dual Gigabit networking. We don't have some huge fancy heatsink around the CPU that has water cooling mounts on it. The Z87X-OC is essentially built with a purpose. It's designed to come in at a strong price point, offer fantastic performance and essentially just do everything you'd expect a board like this to do, and please overclockers at the same time with some features dedicated just for them.

The Z87X-OC is very much about no frills, just performance. We can't say that it lacks "features" too much, though, because while it might be missing some of those features that you're more accustom to seeing, the Z87X-OC offers ones that are designed for this kind of board.

At the same time it's worth noting that a lot of these features are ones that you may not use or may use once or twice to then never worry about them again. Voltage Check Points, OC Ignition and OC Connect to name just a few are some of the ones we're primarily talking about. If the board came in $50 - $100 more expensive, we'd be more worried about that, but at its price point, you don't have to use every single button or switch to really take advantage of what GIGABYTE is offering.

One of the biggest issues I have with this board is the simple fact that it can feel a little scary to someone who isn't an overclocker. The bottom line, though, is that you don't need to be some LN2 touting overclocking extremist to really take advantage of what GIGABYTE is offering in this board. Instead you just need to be someone who wants a quality motherboard that offers some excellent performance out of the box.

Maybe you're not the most comfortable with overclocking, you can go into the BIOS and use one of the preset overclocks if you like. Or maybe when your friend comes over they can give you a free boost in performance. The simple fact is that if you're looking for a quality motherboard at a fantastic price point, this is something that you should be looking at.

The black and orange scheme looks great and the numbers out of the box as you could see in our graphs today are fantastic. I think one of the most important things we can say is don't be turned off from this board due to the heavy emphasis on overclocking. You don't have to be an overclocker to enjoy a quality board like this one.