ASRock Z77 Pro4 (Z77) Motherboard Review

Within the BIOS and the OC Tweaker, you’ll find several options for loading a preset profile to certain plateau’s including 4.6GHz and 4.8GHz to name but a few. However, these didn’t seem to work for us, regardless of us knowing that our CPU can do almost 5GHz. With this in mind and knowing that these pre-defined settings didn’t work for us, we went about tweaking it ourselves manually to see how far we could push it.

We started on the 46 multiplier as this is what we use for our benchmark tests and worked up from there, starting with 4.7GHz using the 47x multiplier. After this, we thought we’d try our hand at the 48x multiplier but this resulted in a boot loop back into the BIOS and we knew that 47x would be the highest we could take it. We then proceeded to try increasing the bus speed from its stock 100MHz, but this also proved difficult and no matter what voltage increases we pushed up or which settings we tweaked, it seemed that we were pushing the board to its limit.

We finally settled on 4.7GHz using the 47x multiplier and tried to claw back the voltage bit by bit of which we ended up getting things back down to 1.358V.

Overall the overclock doesn’t seem that amazing but for a budget board of this nature and pricing, we can’t really complain too much and take our hats off to ASRock for getting our chip this far from a sub £100 Z77 board.