Asus P8Z77-V LX (Z77) Motherboard Review

We’ve mentioned time and time again that we hate the i7 3770k that we have as it’s a terrible overclocker, but we thought we’d give it a go none the less. With that in mind, we started with the 46x multiplier that we used for our full benchmark tests and took it from there by increasing to the 47x multiplier, but straight away this needed more volts that we originally wanted to pump through our processor at 1.425V.

So we decided to try reaching the same result by use of a lower multiplier, and increasing the bus speed, but this deemed the system to be less stable and took us back to the drawing board.

We continued to boot back into the BIOS to see if any settings could be tweaked in terms of voltage control, which found ourselves increasing the VCSSA and PCH voltages to give extra stability in the hope that the vcore voltage could be decreased, even if only by a small margin.

We finally managed to get a stable system at 4.7GHz through use of the 47x multiplier with a stock bus speed. Load-line calibration was set to extreme and the PCH and VCSSA voltages were quite high, almost on 1.3V each, but we were able to decrease the VCORE to 1.4, with the vdroop kicking things up to around 1.416V.

Though this overclock doesn’t exactly jump out as being fantastic, for a budget board it is quite an achievement in its own right.