Intel DZ87KLT-75K LGA1150 Desktop Motherboard Review

By David Ramsey

Manufacturer: Intel Corp.
Product Name: LGA1150 ATX Motherboard
Model Number: DZ87KLT-75K
UPC: 735858263412 EAN: 0073585826341
Price As Tested: $286.00 (Amazon|Newegg)

Full Disclosure: Intel provided the product sample used in this article.

Other vendors make motherboards, but they’re all dependent on Intel for the chipsets and technical specifications. Back in the day, you could get motherboards with Intel-compatible chipsets like NVIDIA’s “nForce”, but Intel no longer licenses their intellectual property.

Until a few years ago, Intel motherboards were, well, boring: reliable, sure, and well-made, but without any really interesting features that would appeal to enthusiasts. That started changing around the time of the Z68 chipset, and although Intel has announced they’ll stop manufacturing desktop motherboards in the near future, the Z87-based DZ78KLT-75K makes a good swan song.

As is standard with Intel press boards, my DZ78KLT-75K was a pre-production sample, with no documentation or accessories (other than a mouse pad) and a beta BIOS. Still, it should be pretty much what the retail market gets, so let’s take a look at it.

Intel doesn’t push any boundaries in their ATX motherboard layout; everything’s where you’d expect it to be. There are a few items of note, though: the first is the inclusion of a single PCI slot in position 6. Since the Z87 chipset no longer supports PCI, Intel uses an ITE Tech 8892E PCI-E to PCI bridge chip. There are six four-pin PWM fan headers, and Intel flags them all in bright red.

The ATX main power connector is in its expected place, with on-board Power and Reset buttons nearby. Just above these buttons is a small audio transducer, a feature I really like to see on a board since it means you don’t have to dangle some little speaker from the front panel header to hear the POST beeps.

Moving to the left reveals a blue USB 3.0 header, then the 8 SATA ports. The six blue ports are 6G ports from the Z87 chipset, while the two gray ports are 3G ports.

The slot layout comprises three PCI-E 16x slots and three PCI-E 1x slots, along with a single PCI slot. Giant skull motifs notwithstanding, a lot of Intel boards go into business and OEM systems, so perhaps the inclusion of the PCI slot is understandable.

From left to right, the I/O panel has a PS/2 mouse-keyboard combo port, two (yellow) USB 2.0 ports, the Back to BIOS button, a FireWire 800 port, two gigabit Ethernet ports, six USB 3.0 ports, a DisplayPort video output, and analog audio panel with an optical audio out port, and a single Thunderbolt port. The yellow USB ports support high-amperage charging for tablets and other devices.

Let’s take a look at the details of this board in the next section.

At the lower left edge of the board, we have a bright yellow front panel audio port, a bright blue FireWire ports, a red fan header, an SPDIF port, a line of boot progress LEDs, and a yellow USB 2.0 header.

Next are two black USB 2.0 ports, the four-digit POST code display, and the front panel header. Above the front panel header are an mSATA slot, a power LED, and a white Consumer IR header.

Intel implements some features with third-party silicon: an ITE Tech PCI-E to PCI bridge supports the single PCI slot, while a Nuvoton NCT6683D 8-bit “Super I/O” microcontroller chip provides sensor and fan monitoring and power control, among other capabilities (this new chip can do quite a bit, although it’s not obvious which capabilities Intel is using). A PEX8606 Gen 2 PCI-E switch provides an extra (virtual) 6 PCI-E lanes, and a Texas Instruments FireWire controller and an unlabeled Thunderbolt controller round out the list.

Intel festoons this board with indicator LEDs. First as a series of bicolor LEDs that light up in sequence as the boot process progresses. If the boot fails, looking at these LEDs gives you an initial place to start looking for the problem– a red LED indicates a problem, while a green LED indicates “all OK”. To the left of these LEDs are a blue SATA activity LED, and two red LEDs that will illuminate when the CPU or voltage regulators overheat.

Next is the four-digit POST code display. Presumably this will give valuable information about board status, POST problems, and the like, but since I have no documentation for the board, the meaning of things like “01 51” remain a mystery.

Last is a set of eight power phase LEDs that light up in sequence as more CPU power phases are activated. You can think of this as an “CPU activity indicator”, since the harder your CPU is working, the more of these LEDs are lit.

Let’s take a look at Intel’s “Visual BIOS” in the next section.

Intel’s “Visual BIOS” makes another appearance with the DZ87KLT-75K motherboard. As with many other UEFI interfaces, there are dozens of screens, far more than I have space to cover! It’s very pretty, in the sense of good layouts and lots of animations and transitions as you mouse/keyboard through the various pages and panels. However, I find the dark blue text on a somewhat darker blue background rather hard to read. The BIOS has several customization features: for example, you can choose the page you’d like it to display initially.

Click the “Devices” tab on the main page takes you to this screen, where you can examine both onboard devices like the USB and LAN ports, as well as what’s plugged into them.

Very fine-grained fan control is supported on the Cooling page. You can set both temperature and RPM thresholds as well as minimum and maximum duty cycles for each fan on the system. Any fan can be slaved to any temperature input: processor, PCH, SIO (the Nuvoton chip), memory, or the CPU voltage regulators.

The Boot Configuration panel lets you set the boot device priority, boot display, and how UEFI booting is handled.

Let’s run this board through my testing gauntlet in the next section.

After a few years of testing motherboards, I’ve noticed that motherboards based on the same chipset tend to have very similar performance. This wasn’t always the case, but now that the memory controller’s in the processor, and the PCI-E lanes are in the chipset, it’s not surprising that everyone’s “Y22” chipset motherboard performs pretty much alike…at stock settings, anyway. Haswell collapses the field even further by moving voltage regulation circuitry onto the CPU. Say goodbye to those exotic 24-phase CPU power supplies of yore…

So testing motherboards, unlike testing CPUs or video cards, is more about examining the proprietary features that make one different from another, as well as testing a board’s overclocking ability, especially if it’s marketed to the enthusiast community.

I tested the Intel DZ87KLT-75K board with a Core i7-4770K CPU at both stock and overclocked speeds. Intel doesn’t have any auto-overclocking or auto-tuning features, so my 4.4GHz overclock was entirely manual. I included the benchmark results from the stock-clocked MSI Z87 MPOWER MAX and ASUS GRYPHON Z87 motherboards with the same CPU, memory, video card, and disk for comparison.

• Motherboard: Intel DZ87KLT-75K Z87 with BIOS 1007
• Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K “Haswell” CPU
• System Memory: 8G (2x4G) Kingston HyperX Genesis DDR3-1600 KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX at 9-9-9-27 timings
• Video Card: AMD Radeon HD6850
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright Silver Arrow
• Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium x64

• AIDA64 v3.00.2514 (Beta version for Haswell CPUs)
• SPECViewPerf 11
• x264HD 5.0

I’ll start with synthetic benchmarks in the next section.

AIDA64 is a full 64-bit benchmark and test suite utilizing MMX, 3DNow! and SSE instruction set extensions, and will scale up to 32 processor cores. An enhanced 64-bit System Stability Test module is also available to stress the whole system to its limits. For legacy processors all benchmarks and the System Stability Test are available in 32-bit versions as well. Additionally, AIDA64 adds new hardware to its database, including 300 solid-state drives. On top of the usual ATA auto-detect information the new SSD database enables AIDA64 to display flash memory type, controller model, physical dimensions, and data transfer performance data. AIDA64 v1.00 also implements SSD-specific SMART disk health information for Indilinx, Intel, JMicron, Samsung, and SandForce controllers.

All of the benchmarks used in this test- Queen, PhotoWorxx, ZLib, and AES- rely on basic x86 instructions, and consume very little system memory while also being aware of Hyper-Threading, multi-processors, and multi-core processors. Of all the tests in this review, AIDA64 is the one that best isolates the processor’s performance from the rest of the system. While this is useful in that it more directly compares processor performance, readers should remember that virtually no “real world” programs will mirror these results.

The Queen and Photoworxx tests are synthetic benchmarks that iterate the function many times and over-exaggerate what the real-world performance would be like. The Queen benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and misprediction penalties of the CPU. It does this by finding possible solutions to the classic queen problem on a chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores.

Like the Queen benchmark, the Photoworxx tests for penalties against pipeline architecture. The synthetic Photoworxx benchmark stresses the integer arithmetic and multiplication execution units of the CPU and also the memory subsystem. Due to the fact that this test performs high memory read/write traffic, it cannot effectively scale in situations where more than two processing threads are used, so quad-core processors with Hyper-Threading have no real advantage. The AIDIA64 Photoworxx benchmark performs the following tasks on a very large RGB image:

• Fill
• Flip
• Rotate90R (rotate 90 degrees CW)
• Rotate90L (rotate 90 degrees CCW)
• Random (fill the image with random colored pixels)
• RGB2BW (color to black & white conversion)
• Difference
• Crop

My 4.4GHz overclock returns 19% more performance in Queen, but, as usual, PhotoWorxx performance is relatively unaffected by CPU overclocking.

Another 19% performance increase in both the AES test and ZLIB tests. This is impressive considering the overclock from 3.7GHz (all cores loaded) to 4.4GHz (all cores loaded) is also 19%, so we’re seeing basically perfect scaling in these tests.

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation is “…a non-profit corporation formed to establish, maintain and endorse a standardized set of relevant benchmarks that can be applied to the newest generation of high-performance computers.” Their free SPECviewperf benchmark incorporates code and tests contributed by several other companies and is designed to stress computers in a reproducible way. SPECviewperf 11 was released in June 2010 and incorporates an expanded range of capabilities and tests. Note that results from previous versions of SPECviewperf cannot be compared with results from the latest version, as even benchmarks with the same name have been updated with new code and models.

SPECviewperf comprises test code from several vendors of professional graphics modeling, rendering, and visualization software. Most of the tests emphasize the CPU over the graphics card, and have between 5 and 13 sub-sections. For this review I ran the Lightwave, Maya, and Seimens Teamcenter Visualization tests. Results are reported as abstract scores, with higher being better.

The lightwave-01 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workloads generated by the SPECapc for Lightwave 9.6 benchmark.

The models for this viewset range in size from 2.5 to 6 million vertices, with heavy use of vertex buffer objects (VBOs) mixed with immediate mode. GLSL shaders are used throughout the tests. Applications represented by the viewset include 3D character animation, architectural review, and industrial design.
The maya-03 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the SPECapc for Maya 2009 benchmark. The models used in the tests range in size from 6 to 66 million vertices, and are tested with and without vertex and fragment shaders.

State changes such as those executed by the application- including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes- are included throughout the rendering of the models. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application.
The tcvis-02 viewset is based on traces of the Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup application (also known as VisMockup) used for visual simulation. Models range from 10 to 22 million vertices and incorporate vertex arrays and fixed-function lighting.

State changes such as those executed by the application- including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes- are included throughout the rendering of the model. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application.

SPECviewperf tests actually comprise code from real-world applications, so their results are more indicative of total system performance than the pure CPU performance metrics we see from synthetic tests like AIDA64. Overclocking brings the expected performance increases, although we seem to hit a ceiling of some sort with the TeamCenter Visualization test, in which manual overclocking doesn’t seem to buy much extra performance.

Tech ARP’s x264 HD Benchmark comprises the Avisynth video scripting engine, an x264 encoder, a sample 1080P video file, and a script file that actually runs the benchmark. The script invokes four two-pass encoding runs and reports the average frames per second encoded as a result. The script file is a simple batch file, so you could edit the encoding parameters if you were interested, although your results wouldn’t then be comparable to others.

This is another example of a useful benchmark that’s based on real-world code. I like encoding benchmarks since they’re one of the few tests that can measure a real-world use of the power of modern multi-core processors. I like this particular benchmark since it’s the best “overclock killer” I’ve seen: systems that will run most stress tests all day long with a given set of overclock settings will crash on this benchmark.

Results scale as expected with this purely CPU-bound benchmark. Auto and manual overclocking boost results by 12% and 22% in Pass 1 and 11% and 21% in Pass 2.

I describe my overclocking experience with this board in the next section.

If you’ve read some of my previous Z87 motherboard reviews, these clock and voltage figures will look very familiar, and reinforce my opinion that I’m limited by the 4770L rather than the motherboard.

Now, normally I’m a fan of manual overclocking, since it remains superior to any automated method for getting the last bit of performance out of your system. However, I found manual overclocking to be much more difficult to do on this motherboard than I have on third-party motherboards, where a CPU voltage boost and an increased multiplier are generally the work of a minute or so, followed by stability testing. With the DZ87KLT-75K, the same process required tweaking many more, sometimes obscure, settings.

Above is the main “performance” screen, which is where you’ll wind up if you plan to overclock this board. Intel tries to show the relationship among the various clocks and voltages with arrows and lines, but the visual impression remains confusing.

Depending on which pane/subpane you click on on the left side of the screen, the right side will change to show you settings and options for that item. Sometimes the item on the left you selected is highlighted; sometimes it’s not. Sometimes there are weird default values. For example, see the “Input Voltage” section at the top right? In this shot it’s 1.8 volts, but the default value this screen shows is zero volts. I still haven’t figured that one out yet.

The inconsistencies continue: after setting the overclock parameters, returning to the main screen shows the correct 4.4GHz clock speed, but the quick clock speed adjustment slider is slammed all the way to the left.

Again, zero values for the default settings in the BIOS. This is what you will see if you reset the BIOS to its defaults, then go into the “Performance” section to start overclocking. The correct voltage values will instantly appear if you touch the sliders, but the initial zero settings can be quite confusing.

Even setting aside some of the user interface niggles, overclocking this board was a lot of work. I had to specifically set ring clock and voltage settings, independently of the CPU clock and voltage settings, in order to achieve a stable overclock. Now, granted that Haswell’s integrated ring voltage regulator is a new feature, and I wouldn’t complain about this had this been the first Z87 motherboard I’d looked at, but I didn’t have to do this on any of the three other Z87 motherboards I’ve looked at in the past few weeks. Perhaps the other motherboards adjust these parameters automatically? I don’t know, but I do know they were a lot easier to overclock. Without the 17-page overclocking guide Intel provided on their press site, I wouldn’t have had much luck.

I’ll give my final thoughts and conclusion on this motherboard in the next section.

At the beginning of this year, Intel announced that it will be ramping down its motherboard production, ceasing it entirely sometime around the transition to the Broadwell, the 14nm successor to Haswell.

What’s making this possible is the way Intel has been moving more and more functionality onto the CPU and the Platform Controller Hub (i.e. the Z87 chipset). Building all required functionality into the CPU and PCH makes it much easier for third parties to design boards with all features most people need. These two chips now provide multiple PCI-E lanes, six SATA 6G ports, and USB, Ethernet, and other ports without requiring a single slice of third party silicon.

Of course, there’s still plenty of room for vendors to distinguish their own offerings, and Intel is no exception, adding an expensive PLX multiplexer, PCI-E to PCI bridge, an mSATA connector, and other features to this board. These features aim this board squarely at the enthusiast community, and like most Intel boards, it will likely be a paragon of reliability. My only real complaint is some of the complexity and quirks of the BIOS (like those zero voltage readings), which will hopefully be addressed at some point. But the BIOS I have now (Intel sent me their latest unreleased BIOS when I had problems with the board as delivered) is later than the latest version on Intel’s support page for this motherboard, so I have to assume the retails boards have these same problems.

Enthusiasts don’t typically look at Intel motherboards, but maybe they should. Although it’s expensive at about $260 (Amazon|Newegg), the DZ87KLT-75K is competitive with enthusiast-level boards at this price point from third party vendors, and inclusions like the PLX multiplexer make it a good board for those who want the maximum performance out of an SLI or CrossFireX system, with some PCI-E lanes left over.

Sometimes it’s hard to figure Intel out. I’ve never seen an advertisement for an Intel motherboard, so it would seem that they’re not aiming at the enthusiast or individual system builder, until you look at this board, which is obviously aimed at them.

+ POST code progress and power phase LEDs
+ mSATA connector and POST code display
+ If you still need a PCI slot, this is one of the few LGA1150 boards that has one.
+ 3-year warranty beats most of the competition

– No automatic overclocking function
– No included utilities (may be in retail box)
– No wireless features

COMMENT QUESTION: Which motherboard manufacturer do you prefer most?