  We present a comparative study of the invariant mass and rapidity
distributions in Drell-Yan lepton pair production, with particular emphasis on
the role played by the QCD evolution. We focus our study around the Z resonance
($50 <Q < 200$ GeV) and perform a general analysis of the
factorization/renormalization scale dependence of the cross sections, with the
two scales included both in the evolution and in the hard scatterings. We also
present the variations of the cross sections due to the errors on the parton
distributions (pdf's) and an analysis of the corresponding $K$-factors.
Predictions from several sets of pdf's, evolved by MRST and Alekhin are
compared with those generated using \textsc{Candia}, a NNLO evolution program
that implements the theory of the logarithmic expansions, developed in a
previous work. These expansions allow to select truncated solutions of varying
accuracy using the method of the $x$-space iterates. The evolved parton
distributions are in good agreement with other approaches. The study can be
generalized for high precision searches of extra neutral gauge interactions at
the LHC.
