Throughout the vast majority of Z77 boards that I have overclocked on, its safe to say that most of these have been aimed at the enthusiast / high end markets and so naturally over clocking is a little more expected and consequently features such as higher specification MOSFETs and substantially more power phases are to be found, giving the processor all the power it needs and as smooth as possible.
Part of the beauty of over clocking the current line of unlocked Intel CPU’s is actually down to how easy the process is and how forgiving the chips are to a certain point. This means that even on a mainstream board such as this one, there is still the potential for getting the processor up and past the 4.5GHz mark with ease and past that with a little bit of voltage tweaking from within the UEFI BIOS.
Due to this ease of over clocking, the P8Z77-V quickly saw 4.7GHz appear with no other adjustments required apart from increasing the ratio to 47x. Past this and to take it just that little bit further, a bit of load-line calibration and increase on the PLL and core voltages saw 4.8GHz stable. Sadly anything past this was not-to-be with unstable results. 4.8GHz though is highly impressive for a board of this type.
Mainstream boards are the manufacturers bread & butter. I like this board. While the ROG boards only cater to the minority of people this kind of board makes the most sense to me personally. Although I’ve had a number of ROG boards pass under my nose which I’ve played with & tested, my personal rig which is very mainstream. I like the fact that this one has a legacy PCI slot as I still use an Asus Xonar sound card which is PCI. I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon. It’s sound is far better quality than the integrated sound bundled with most (if not all) high end boards & it’s overclocking capabilities are more than enough for most people. I owned (if I can call ‘owning’ parts I’ve managed to con from the suppliers) this particular model of board for a while and I was more than happy with it, in fact I’d still be using it if I hadn’t managed to snaffle a newer mainstream board from Gigabyte which is just as good.
I have it , its very good board , and ASUS is always the best and my favourite when its coming to motherboards
From what I have been reading Asus makes good boards but the RMA process is amount to: Just throw out the mobo and buy a new one. It is that bad.