We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASUS, MSI, Western Digital and Corsair.

Looking above at our testbed you can see there's nothing really out of the ordinary when it comes to the testbed on a whole. The only change from recent motherboard reviews is the inclusion of the Intel i7 3770k Ivy Bridge CPU which you've seen us use before, just not in a motherboard review like this one.

Before we get into the performance side of things the first thing we've got to do is cover the overclocking side of things.

Everything at the moment has pointed to Ivy Bridge overclocking not being that great under water and air cooling conditions due to the higher temperatures that are being seen on the new Intel CPU.

Looking below you can see the 4.72GHz clock we got out of the ASRock Z77 Extreme6 follows that trend compared to clocks of 4.8GHz - 5.2GHz being seen with 2600k Sandy Bridge processors.

It's a nice overclock from the default 3.5GHz clock on offer from the 3770k, but it's not as aggressive as we've seen out of other Intel processors recently. It should still yield a strong performance boost over the stock clocks, so let's see just how the new Z77 Extreme6 performs.

Let's get started!