Asus P8Z77-V LX (Z77) Motherboard Review

Taking a look at the P8Z77 was quite refreshing from the high-end boards that we generally have pass through our hands. You generally see us taking a look at enthusiast boards, but every so often we receive something like this, and am somewhat surprised every time, especially when a board of this calibre can keep up with some of the big boys in the market.

Taking a look on the style front, we see nothing out of the ordinary with a typical blue budget design going on. As the board isn’t aimed at the enthusiast and overclocking market, we see a different power phase configuration with no additional cooling around the CPU socket, but from our results, you can see that performance and overclockability didn’t suffer at all.

Performance wise, we can see that the board was able to keep up with a whole host of other boards from different brands across all tests, with certain benchmarks giving stronger results on the P8Z77-V LX than some of the higher-end boards we had to compare with.

Overclocking was exactly the same story, with us believing at first that overclocking would be far behind that of what we’ve seen on the likes of the Maximus V Gene, Z77-GD65 and G1.Sniper M3 but boy how was we wrong. We managed to get to 4.7GHz, which isn’t exactly fantastic in this day and age, when SandyBridge was giving us 5GHz across a variety of boards, but not only does Ivy Bridge not give the same clocks, but our chip is one of the worst performing we’ve ever seen, let alone the worst we’ve ever used.

With strong performance and overclockability that can rival some of the high-end boards, it seems that this board offers everything needed for those wanting to upgrade to a Z77 based system that has support for both 2nd and 3rd generation Intel processors. With a price point of £95, it’s unbelievable value for money, and we can certainly see retailers adopting this board with an i5 3570k and memory bundle for amazing bang for buck greatness.

If you’re looking for a budget friendly Z77 board that doesn’t skimp on features, while still offering rivalling performance and overclockability then this board is definitely worth considering, especially as you’ll still have enough money out of £100 left to buy a pint once you’ve built your system, consider it a treat after the hard work of the build. Luckily with the patented Asus UEFI BIOS and other easy to use key features, it should be a breeze anyway, but we all like a drink anyway, right?