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, MemoRight and Corsair.

Looking above you can see a run down on our testbed so we won't go into any more detail on that. Instead we'll quickly cover the boards that we'll be using in our graphs today before moving onto the overclocking side of things which is then of course followed up with the performance tests.

The main board we want to compare against the ASRock Z75 Pro3 is its big brother the ASRock Z77 Pro3 based on the higher end Z77 chipset. Going over the Z75 Pro3 today, though, we can see there's nothing too major going on when it comes to looking at the two boards so it will be interesting to see what goes on with performance.

Along with those two boards, though, we've also got the ASRock X79 Extreme4, ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z and ASUS Maximus V GENE to round out the collection. As always, though, before we get into the testing side of things we want to quickly take a look at what's going on with the overclocking side of things which could possibly be an area which isn't as strong as the Z77 Pro3.

On the Z77 Pro3 we found ourselves getting a solid 4.6GHz clock our of our i7 3770k CPU which is by no means the highest we've achieved with some other Z77 boards offering us closer to 4.8GHz. With that as our starting point today, though, we headed into the BIOS, adjusted our voltages and set the CPU multiplier to 46x.

As we'd hope we didn't run into any problems at 4.6GHz so we moved up to the 47x multiplier which got into Windows with no issues, but it did BSOD quite quickly after we started our MediaEspresso encode. So we headed back into the BIOS, moved to 46x multiplier and bumped the BCLK up ever so slightly to 100.5 which resulted in our CPU running at 4.62GHz.

Let's get started!