Biostar TZ77XE4 (Z77) Motherboard Review

As part of our tests, we push our system to 4.6GHz, and with this particular board, that was quite easy once we had the latest BIOS. A simple increase to 1.35V allowed us to push the multiplier up and leave the rest on auto. We could then continue to run our overclock benchmarks and things were 100% stable.

After, we wanted to see how far things could be pushed with this board and immediately tried the 47x multiplier for 4.7GHz. We continued to boot until the system presented us with a BSOD and we rummaged back into the BIOS to increase the voltage to 1.4V. This proved stable enough to boot into Windows but continued to BSOD after we ran anything intensive.

We marched back into the BIOS to adjust some of the other settings including Load Line Calibration, only to find this made matters worse. Adjusting the SA voltage seemed to do the trick and we were able to boot and run a variety of tests to prove stability. Not content on staying at 4.7GHz, we then increased to the 48x multiplier and tried 4.8GHz to find that in some tests it was stable, though others ended up crashing. Trying things a slightly different way, we went back to the 47x multiplier and started to increase the BCLK to match 4.8GHz but the same situation arose. We started to claw the BCLK back bit by bit until we ended up with our final overclock.

The final overclock ended up at 4755.62MHz or 4.75GHz at 1.4V with simple adjustments to the SA voltage.

We do believe that 4.8GHz is achievable on this board, but this would mean increasing the Vcore slightly more, and then we would have higher temperatures to contend with as the 3770k can run quite hot when more than 1.4V is passed through it.