Battle Royale
We go six rounds in the most
brutal head-to-head ever!
INTEL Z77 Motherboard throwndown
Z
77 is here and as usual we
took several boards and
pitted them against each
other to see which would
reign supreme. X79 was a
one horse race and thankfully we’ve
moved on to more exciting times with
Z77. Indeed, prior to launch LUCID’s
MVP software was causing massive
debates all over the web (especially
on HWBOT) but it seems that issue
has solved itself and the general
consensus is that there’s no room
for it in the overclocking circles. So
we can hopefully put that behind us
and get on with what really matters,
overclocking the hell out of our Core
i7 CPUs in our favourite benchmarks.
With such an open platform,
motherboards are bound to play
a bigger role in performance and
overclocking headroom than they
did with Z68 and P67, where it was
simply a multiplier game. With so
many variables, Z77 is sure to allow
many vendors an opportunity to
distinguish themselves. We’ve seen
this a little with new memory records
almost every week, but the vast
majority are not convinced, because
it’s become very apparent that the
right memory with the right CPU will
yield these results and it may not be
motherboard related at all.
Having said that, memory clocking
is something we’ll look at another
day on Ivy-Bridge when we have
2600MHz+ memory in the lab, until
then we will concentrate on the
motherboards themselves and
hopefully pick out the best out of
this lot. While we’d have loved to
have at least two offerings from
each relevant vendor, some didn’t
manage to make it to the roundup,
so much like the X79 roundup
before; we are sitting with the finest
from ASUS, GIGABYTE, ASROCK,
MSI and ECS. We are sure to see
even more boards based on this
platform in future, but for now (at
least at the time of writing) these
represented what most people
would have access too.
As always, differentiating
motherboards from each other
isn’t an easy task, we believe that
the worst sample CPU is actually
the best one to use because it
better shows the differences
between motherboards than a
great sample. As such we used
a very early ES sample to test
the boards. So what you see here
is a worst case scenario really,
and each and every one of these
boards will do better naturally
with better RAM and CPU. We kept
the memory speed at 2,400MHz
which most IB CPUs can achieve.
It’s worth adding that the only
board that had no problems with
2,666MHz and higher out the box
with our chosen CPU was the
Maximus V Gene which speaks
well for the motherboard indeed.
Sure enough you can tweak your
way to this speed and beyond on
every motherboard here and it’s
not an issue with a better CPU,
but once again the worst CPU
we have allows motherboards to
differentiate themselves better.
What follows then are our findings.
Issue