Whilst looking at the boards specification, it has to be noted that the 4+1 power phase design does leave little hope for gaining a high overclock and typically with this arrangement, I would expect to see no more than 4.6/4.6GHz possible, let alone stable. Not going to be deterred by this, the Z77-A does surprise me in the fact that it was able to boot to Windows at a whopping 4.8GHz, which for a board of this calibre is quite an achievement. Sadly this was not as stable as one would have hoped for and even pushing the vCore to the limits and adding some load-line calibration and vDroop saw a non-stable chip when it came to benchmarking.
Dropping the chip back down to 4.7GHz resulted in a stable platform and the vCore within BIOS could be set to 1.42v. To be honest I am very surprised that this board managed this level considering the fact that the P8Z77-V LK that I looked at a few weeks ago only just managed this speed with a push.
After working with so many so called high end boards one tend to become jaded, simple boards like these are a breath of fresh air, they’re easy to work with, overclock surprisingly well and do exactly what they’re supposed to. To my way of thinking, simple is better.
The chipset heatsink is the exact same one which I had on the south bridge of my old Asus X58 board.
good motherboard for beginners like me..
eteknix can you please tell me if it can SLI.?
it can 2 way sli or crossfire and it comes with sli bridge