absolute flagship Z97 motherboard for Broadwell-c?

Hello,

Back in 2013 I had the choice of going for the older Ivy Bridge or the just released Haswell, and from looking at benchmarks showing that Haswell runs hotter and doesn't overclock as well I decided to go with the older Ivy. Bought i7-3770K and the absolute flagship Z77 board, the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7. I recently decided that I will not be upgrading that machine any further and keep it as a dedicated Win 7 PC aimed at running Win 7 games of about 2009-2016, and build a new Win 10 PC to handle 2016+ games. I also have a Win XP PC covering 2001-2009 and a Win 98 PC covering 1995-2001. Still undecided whether I should also build a dedicated DOS PC to cover pre-1995 games or just use DOSBox, but that's besides the point.

The jump in performance in Skylake, the last Win7 compatible CPU, is negligible compared to Ivy. There's some improvement from DDR4 ram, but the cpu itself is barelly any different really. Which is why I thought there's no point upgrading. But just now I found out what appears to be a closely guarded secret - i7-5775c overclocked to 4.2ghz outperforms i7-7700K oc to 5ghz in most games! Even while being held back by DDR3! Looks like the on-die 128mb L4 cache really helps gaming performance. That makes me feel like crap since this Broadwell-c CPU being so good means I no longer have the best possible platform for this Win7 build.

So I want to ask 2 things. First, which is the absolute flagship Z97 motherboard for an i7-5775c, basically like how my Gigabyte Z77X UP7 is the absolute flagship Ivy board, and the other thing I want to ask is, how much can I sell my old mobo and cpu for?

Comparing the platform improvements on the Z270 to the small performance difference between the Kaby and the Broadwell, I'd rather take the Z270 or wait for the rumored 6 Core Intels.

To answer your question, you'd probably want to look at another Gigabyte board or the Asus ROGs.

Nah, definitely not going Kaby Lake, Microsoft has stated they will not support Windows 7 on Kaby and Ryzen, meaning no windows updates. Remember this is for dedicated Win 7 PC for 2009-2016 games. So anything newer will be more suitable for the win 10 build I will do eventually. Also, i7-5775c at 4.2ghz outperforming 7700K at 5ghz while also running cooler and consuming less power, really reminds me of Pentium M outperforming Pentium 4 at lower clock and power consumption back in the day, hence why I picked Pentium M 780 with Asus P4C800E Deluxe board for my win 98se build.

Did some research, looks like the flagships for Z97 were:
Asrock Z97 OC Formula
Asus Z97 Deluxe
Gigabyte Z97X SOC Force
MSI Z97 XPower AC
EVGA Z97 Classified

So I guess the question is which of those is the very best. I would think probably the Gigabyte is considering that board seems to be a successor of my Z77X UP7, though I have my doubts about it, my UP7 has a 32-phase VRM and was really expensive, this Z97X SOC Force seems to only have 8 phases and is also much cheaper...

Depends on what you define as Flagships. Just off the top of my head there for the Asus boards there was the ROG Maximus VII series which personally I would buy over the Z97 Deluxe. Not to mention the Sabertooth series which I'd take over the Z97 Deluxe also.

GodOfGaming said:

Did some research, looks like the flagships for Z97 were:
Asrock Z97 OC Formula
Asus Z97 Deluxe
Gigabyte Z97X SOC Force
MSI Z97 XPower AC
EVGA Z97 Classified

So I guess the question is which of those is the very best. I would think probably the Gigabyte is considering that board seems to be a successor of my Z77X UP7, though I have my doubts about it, my UP7 has a 32-phase VRM and was really expensive, this Z97X SOC Force seems to only have 8 phases and is also much cheaper...

Click to expand...

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/MAXIMUS_VII_HERO/

I had the z87 version for a while and it was a hell of a board.

Ok, it definitely won't be the Gigabyte Z97X SOC, it's obviously lower end than my current Z77X UP7, but I also noticed it has only 6 SATA ports which might end up not being quite enough, and even worse I just found out that many owners have been complaining that after a while it develops a bug where the bios gets corrupted and it doesnt post anymore. That's one less board to think about.

I didn't look too in-depth into the Asus models, but I don't know if they have anything on that high level. There's the Maximus Extreme series that could fit, but they don't seem to have a version for the Z97 chipset, there's a version for Z87 and then jumping to Z170. If there was a version for Z97 it would have been named Asus Maximus VII Extreme, but can't find it on google, so it doesn't exist.

So I guess that leaves Asrock Z97 OC Formula, Evga Z97 Classified, and MSI Z97 XPower AC. I'll research them more in-depth a bit later, but at a glance the MSI seems to be the most feature packed of those? Has 16-phase power VRM too, which is more than the 8-phase VRM of the other boards on the list.

P.S. ooh, so the reason there's no Maximus VII Extreme as it turns out is because they decided to merge all its features into the Maximus VII Formula. And from what I can see its pretty feature rich. Actually looks like a rather nice board. I have a question though, from what I can see it has the same kind of plastic cover as the sabertooth models, which I remember was actually causing them to run hotter, does the Formula experience any such issues?

I read trough a long broadwell-c owner's thread in another forum and ended up with the information that support for those particular cpus is lacking in most motherboards, but looks like the Maximus VII line works great, no one had tried it with the Formula in particular but there were plenty of confirmations with all the other Maximus VII models. So I've pretty much decided on the Asus Maximus VII Formula.

There's only one thing left to consider though, I noticed one of the users had complained that performance is lacking under win7 but works great in win10 on the same machine. Possibly something about older Intel ME driver for win7 or whatever. I need to research into this, because if it's true and not just an isolated case, I'd rather stay on Ivy.

You missed one. The asrock z97-extreme6
It is by far the ultimate broadwell-c board, speaking from experience

Good luck finding a 5775C for a decent price. Wish i held onto the one i had previously.

ASUS Z97-WS

I have 4 x ASRock Z97 boards.
One with i7 5775C, 3 with i7 4790k.
3 are the Extreme 6 one the Z97m WS.

It's the best Hackintosh solution I found, which means I can run Apples Logic and ESX 24 @ 4.6GHz.
I bounce from 8.1 to OSX at will.

Recently bought the Z97m and i7 4790k both for 359 thanks to Ryzen caused price drops.

I'd like Windows 10 someday, but I work offline with these workstations.
Once I'm confident of Windows 10 and i9 Quad with 1MB L2 Cache actually being better for my apps I'll move.
Right now my projects rock, no need for me to go anywhere.

I did have some great scores with i7 5775C on the CZ97. Ring Mod overclocking kept the Crystal Well Cache stable @ 2200MHz.
CPU hit 4.26. Just not consistently stable.
ASRock is rock solid with NVMe and 3.8 was plenty fast for my apps.
Great CPU.
They neutered it with 64MBs L4 and called it a Xeon.
There's only 1 i7 5775C. Bad ass chip....