Biostar Gaming Z97X Review

Performance Analysis

We noticed that, as with several other motherboards, the Gaming Z97X fails to boost to our Core i7-4770K's maximum turbo frequency of 3.9GHz in any benchmark at default settings - even lightly-threaded ones. Despite an apparent base clock tweak of 0.5MHz, this resulted in fairly meagre scores at stock speed in all our speed-related tests. The audio performance was above average, though, with a small advantage over the ALC898 codec, but if audio quality is important, you'll likely want to take advantage of that well-placed 1x PCI-E slot.


Once overclocked, things improved and the overall result in the Media Benchmarks was enough to leapfrog several competitors, although the game tests still resulted in fairly average results. The M.2 performance was mid-table, being noticeably faster than the slowest result of the Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H and fastest of the Asus Z97i-Plus at 754MB/sec read and 558MB/sec write. The SATA 6Gbps speeds were very good, though, with the fastest read speed we've seen, albeit by 1MB/sec. As per usual, the ASMedia ports should be avoided when plugging in your speedy SSDs, at least if they're SATA 6Gbps-capable.

Conclusion

It's a shame that we should remember the Gaming Z97X as the first motherboard we've seen to include its drivers and software on a handy USB stick. It's otherwise all rather average from start to finish given the price, although we should note that this is still early days it may well come in lower or higher as we've based our UK price on the US MSRP, which excludes taxes too. The fact remains, though, that the motherboard market is very competitive and the Gaming Z97X has landed right in the middle.

It doesn't look particularly racy, the EFI is mediocre, it lacks the features offered by its closest rivals, namely Asus's Maximus VII Ranger, and it didn't overclock quite as well either. In most other regards it's a solid effort - it has the full complement of overclocking tools, right-angled connectors and well-placed PCI-E slots. It's certainly not a bad motherboard by any means, but as we mentioned earlier in the review, we'd much rather Biostar ditched the gimmicky 1990's-esque front panel and lowered the price. As it stands, there are plenty of better examples above and below the price, although it's certainly refreshing to see a solid motherboard land in our lap that isn't from the usual suspects.