Last’s month’s cover feature sported a budget PC that included Intel’s Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition CPU, which we’d overclocked to 4.6GHz. This low-price CPU can provide a great way of getting some decent grunt for under £60, and Asus has recently offered BIOS updates for all its cheap boards with H81 chipsets, which enable them to access unlocked multipliers. One downside of this route, though, is that you need a way to flash the BIOS in order for such a board to work with the Pentium G3258. However, ASRock has just presented an alternative route, via a cut-price, full-on Z97 motherboard – the Z97M Anniversary.
It’s only slightly more expensive than an H81 board, and it can overclock Intel’s cheap new CPU automatically, with just four keyboard presses from you. This automatic overclock feature is currently available in two of ASRock’s Z97-based boards, which have ‘Anniversary’ in their names. They’re geared towards Intel’s Anniversary Pentium, of course, and we’re looking at the micro-ATX model here – the Z97M Anniversary, which retails for just £63 inc VAT.
That price might seem like a lot to pay compared with an updated Asus motherboard with an H81 chipset, but you don’t have to worry about having the latest BIOS with the ASRock board – the Z97M Anniversary is compatible with the Pentium G3258 and all Devil’s Canyon CPUs straight out of the box. Secondly, as it uses the Z97 chipset, it’s likely to offer more in the way of future proofing than an H81 board too, as it should work with Intel’s Broadwell CPUs, which are due to be released early next year.
To overclock the Pentium G3258, all you need to do is tap the P key as you power on the system, in the same way you would hit Del or F2 to enter the EFI. This method only works with the Pentium G3258, and it brings up a simple display screen from which you can select from several preconfigured overclocks, going up to 4.2GHz. This maximum frequency is a 1GHz overclock from the stock frequency of 3.2GHz, which is a decent boost.
However, 4.2GHz is still fairly tame, as most of the new Pentium chips should hit 4.5GHz with relative ease, and ASRock has played it save with a hefty vcore of 1.28V too – enough to push most examples we’ve seen to over 4.6GHz. However, the automatic overclock worked well in our tests, so if you’re a timid overclocker, or even an overclocking virgin, it offers a solid way to get some extra performance without even visiting the EFI. Of course, you’ll still need to visit the EFI to make sure your motherboard is running your RAM at the correct speed, and so on.
The PCB itself is a pretty spartan affair, but we wouldn’t expect anything more for the price. There are six SATA 6Gbps ports, which is several more than most mini-ITX boards, plus you get two 1x PCI-E slots in addition to the 16x slot, so you can easily drop in a discrete sound card or another expansion card. Layout is generally good too, although the latch for securing graphics cards at the end of the 16x slot is positioned slap-bang next to the DIMM slots, making it tricky to reach. There’s next to no cooling on the PCB itself either, other than a small heatsink for the chipset, so running sky-high overclocks 24/7 probably won’t be a great idea. There are two USB 3 ports on the rear I/O panel plus a USB 3 header and up to eight USB 2 ports, with four of these also provided by headers on the PCB.
Performance
The automatic overclock of our Pentium G3258 to 4.2GHz proved to be perfectly stable, so we dropped our usual Intel Core i7-4770K test CPU into the Z97M Anniversary to see how it fared against its pricier siblings. Sadly, though, its numbers in the Media Benchmarks were generally lower, although not massively so; its overall score of 2,041 was only 71 points adrift of the Asus Maximus VII Ranger, for example. The same was true in our game tests, where the minimum frame rate in our Total War: Shogun 2 CPU benchmark was a little slower than we’d expect.
The SATA 6Gbps ports are all powered by the Z97 chipset, so it wasn’t surprising to see respectable read and write speeds of 543MB/sec and 517MB/sec respectively – perfectly capable of maxing out a modern SSD. Meanwhile, the EFI looked dated but snazzy and was very responsive too. Oddly, though, ASRock has changed some of the usual shortcut assignments, such as pressing F5 to load defaults, but otherwise, it was easy enough to overclock our CPU. Sadly, though, frequencies of 4.7GHz and 4.8GHz were too high for the Z97M Anniversary, even at 1.3V, as it fell over during stress testing.
The chokes on the PCB around the CPU also became very hot during overclocking, and the CPU became very toasty too. Even backing down to 4.6GHz and a 1.26V vcore didn’t help. In the end, we settled on 4.3GHz and 1.22V – a fair way lower than we would expect from a Z97 board. This frequency was still enough to provide a hefty boost to our benchmark scores, though, with the overall score rising from 2,341 to 2,671, but the significantly lower clock speed meant it trailed behind other Z97 boards we’ve seen.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to overclock a quad-core CPU beyond 4.5GHz on a daily basis, the ASRock Z97M Anniversary isn’t for you. However, the lower demands of Intel’s Pentium G3258 make the Z97M Anniversary a great buy if you want to put together a bargain gaming machine, especially as you won’t need to find a way of flashing the BIOS first, as you would with one of Asus’ H81 motherboards.
Thanks to its Z97 chipset, the Z97M Anniversary also offers compatibility with future CPUs , as well as an effective way of automatically overclocking the Pentium, albeit only to 4.2GHz, but this frequency is still a huge leap from its stock speed. The EFI is slick and well laid-out too, so if you’ll be sticking to low-end CPUs and applying modest overclocks, the Z97M Anniversary is definitely worth considering. Unless you’re new to overclocking, though, we recommend spending a little extra on ASRock’s superior Z97 Pro3 instead, which is still a bargain at £77, but it’s also quicker and a superior overclocker. ANTONY LEATHER
SPECIFICATIONS
Chipset Intel Z97
CPU socket Intel LGA1150
Memory support 2 slots: max 16GB DDR3 (up to 3,200MHz)
Expansion slots One 16x PCI-E 3, two 1x PCI-E 3
Sound Realtek ALC662 8-channel
Networking 1 x Realtek Gigabit LAN
Overclocking Base clock 90–300MHz, CPU multiplier 8-120x; max voltages, CPU 2V, RAM 1.8V
Ports 6 x SATA 6Gbps (Z97), 8 x USB 2, 4 x USB 3, 1 x LAN, 3 x audio out, line-in, mic, 1 x HDMI, 1 x DVI, 1 x VGA
Dimensions (mm) 226 x 193
VERDICT
The Z97M Anniversary isn’t ideal for overclocking quad-core CPUs, but it handles Intel’s Pentium G3258 fine and also has an automatic overclocking tool.