ASRock Z77 Pro4 (Z77) Motherboard Review

Looking at the board, we can see the very dark colour scheme which ASRock has been seen to use on a number of boards lately and personally I’m quite a big fan of it as it will look great in a variety of chassis. The board uses the ATX form factor and features very subtle cooling across the layout and overall is quite a nice design which is simple yet effective.

Moving in closer to the CPU socket area, we see the LGA1155 socket with quite a large amount of space around it to compensate for larger CPU coolers. In terms of cooling, we find a small black, passive heatsink towards the top of the board. Normally we’d find a 4 or 8-pin power connector towards the rear I/O but ASRock have opted to move it over slightly and can be seen in the right hand side of our image below.

The only other cooling on the board is situated in the bottom right, just near to the PCI-Express slots and features a low-profile passive design to allow for longer graphics cards and includes some yellow/gold ASRock branding upon it.

Moving up the board to the DIMM slots, we can see we have the typical four slots running in dual channel mode supporting up to32GB of DDR3 memory with speeds from 1066MHz all the way up to 2800+ through use of overclocking and also supports Intel XMP specification memory. Also around this area you can see the 24-pin ATX power connector, a USB 3.0 native header and two SATA III 6GB/s connectors.

Moving across to the opposite end of the board we find a nice selection of expansion slots with a single PCI-Express x1 slot at the top, a PCI-Express x16 slot running in x16 mode, a legacy PCI slot, a further PCI-Express x16 slot, however this runs at x4 speeds and down from this we see another two legacy PCI slots. In terms of multi-GPU technology, this board has support for CrossFireX but sadly doesn’t include any support for Nvidia SLI. While some users still use PCI, we would have welcomed the dismissal of two of the slots to make room for another PCI-Express x16 slot but being a budget board, we can’t criticise ASRock too much.

Further down from the various expansion slots, we can see the various headers and connectors including a HD Audio connector, COM port header, clear CMOS jumper, IR and CIR1 headers. Carrying along the board, there are two USB 2.0 headers, a chassis fan header, front panel connectors including power LED header and a header specifically for a speaker.

As we saw earlier, the board includes two SATA III ports towards the DIMM slots, but further down in the corner is another two SATA III ports (light grey) making four SATA III ports in total and we also have four SATA II ports. Two of the SATA III ports utilise the Intel Z77 chipset and support RAID functionality, whereas the other two SATA III ports use the ASMedia ASM1061 controller and have no RAID support. Sadly ASRock don’t label which ports utilise which controller either and the manual and website don’t make things clear for the consumer either. The remaining four SATA II ports all utilise the Intel Z77 Express chipset also.

Finally moving over to the rear I/O, we can see we have a total of six USB 2.0 ports, a ps2 keyboard port, VGA, DVI and HDMI connectors, two USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit LAN port courtesy of the Realtek RTL8111E controller, an optical SPDIF port and five audio jack ports all provided by the Realtek ALC892 audio codec.