Biostar TZ77XE4 (Z77) Motherboard Review

This board was a perfect chance for Biostar to move into markets that they’d never been able to reach before, such as the UK, US and other mainstream Western countries. Biostar had a good set of launch products for Z77 which seemed to offer some unique aspects that other manufacturers may have missed on, and this mainly comes down to the styling and design. The board is bright orange, and that’s a daring move which we’ve only really seen the likes of Gigabyte do with the X58-OC board from many moons ago, but it seems to work, and we applaud Biostar for taking such an extreme move.

In terms of features, it seems to have everything you’d expect including a huge array of SATA ports, ranging from SATA II and III that are able to give you performance when needed the most, though from our tests, the SATA performance didn’t seem that great until we started pushing the CPU. An odd outcome to say the least, but multiple retakes of the test veered the same results.

Taking a look at the performance on a whole, we saw the TZ77XE4 offer up similar performance to that of other mainstream boards from more well known brands and overclocking seemed to go quite smoothly after several BIOS updates and our i7 3770k was able to be pushed to a healthy 4.75GHz, which could rival some of the more overclock focussed boards in this product segment and came out slightly better than most, and a lot better than we first expected.

One letdown that we did feel came from this board was the BIOS. Not only did we need several updates to allow an overclock, but several aspects were reported falsely such as memory speed, which no matter what; insisted that the XMP profile was 1333MHz, though booting into Windows revealed the true 1866MHz with correct timings that we expected from our Corsair Vengeance kit. The BIOS isn’t the prettiest we’ve ever seen, and the mouse support seems to be a bit hit and miss with random clicks and movements throughout our use. We then decided to stick to the keyboard, but locating various options to overclock seemed quite tricky and had us in and out of menus for quite some time.

Once we had got our heads around the layout, we could finally get to pushing things and see what this board could do, and the overclock performance at 4.6GHz was impressive and fell exactly where we expected it to be within our comparison charts.

We also noticed that with our watercooling units, we had no issues whatsoever, due to its relatively small amount of space needed, though larger CPU coolers may be faced with slight issues between the CPU socket and top PCI-Express x16 lane due to the layout of the board, so be sure to research into it when you decide on what cooler you’ll be running this with.

With the only slight issues being that of the area required for large CPU coolers, and the BIOS not being majorly user friendly, we find ourselves staring at the price and can’t help but wonder why it’s so cheap. Priced in at around $149, it’s one of the cheapest full-sized ATX boards we’ve tested under the Z77 chipset and this is an extremely good selling point for Biostar.

With a revision 2 of this board, fixing the CPU cooler design issue and some more handywork needing to be done with the BIOS, we can see this board selling quite well and price will come down to the final decision in our eyes and with that in mind, we’re happy to award it with our Bang For Buck Award.