ASRock Z77 Pro3 (Intel Z77) Motherboard Review

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.

Outside of the ASRock Z77 Pro3 running at both stock and overclocked speeds, we've got the more expensive Z77 Extreme6 from ASRock, X79 Extreme4 and two options from ASUS which include the Maximus IV Extreme-Z and Maximus V GENE.

When it came to the overclocking side of things I wasn't too sure what to expect from such a cheap board, so we adjusted our voltages and started at a 45x multiplier which gave us an even 4.5GHz. We got into Windows and did some testing and didn't run in to any problems, so we headed back into the BIOS to try out the 46x Multiplier.

That also looked good so we moved it up to the 47x one which results in a 4.7GHz clock speed. We got into Windows no problem, but during our MediaEspresso encode, the program crashed out at 22%, meaning it was time to head back into the BIOS and take it back slightly.

We messed around with the 46x multiplier and BCLK a little, but we found the best place for our CPU on this board was simply at 46 x 100 which results in a 4.6GHz clock speed on our Intel i7 3770k CPU.

Let's get started!