Z87 Chipset and intel H87

[Xiti]

Hello all,

I am currently going to purchase a new motherboard for video editing and gaming purpose. I am also going to buy the new Haswell processor. But one thing that I cannot understand anything about is the chipset. I came across 2 different chipset of Z87 and Intel H87 while searching for motherboards. Can anyone tell me what is the difference between the Z87 and the Intel H87 chipset and also which is more powerful? Thanks.

[MattyBoy]

You will get the only difference of overclocking and PCIe lanes in Z87 chipset motherboard comparing the H87 chipset motherboard. So, if you are looking for a overclocking system then you can go and pay extra for the Z87 chipset boards but if you are not then simply go for the H87 chipset. The H87 boards are also produced very cheaply since it uses cheaper components that do not support overclocking.

[PeterAGASSI]

Yes, dont even try to overclock the H87 chipset boards because you never know when it will blast. Because of all this features that are missing this board comes for a lower price. But H87 boards looks to be having half the number of phases compared to Z87 boards. Looking at AMD, there are far away in the category and Intel looks to be dominating now.

[Joshua]

The Z87 motherboards also supports the splitting of the 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes into x8/x8 or x8/x4/x4 for both SLI and Crossfire technology. Also, you will be able to do crossfire of Amd graphics card on the H87 boards and cannot perform the Nvidia SLI technology. So, it will better that you go with the Z87 chipset boards that has good power performance. If you dont need CPU overclocking feature or running GPU SLI feature than you can go with the H87 motherboards.