ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77 (Intel Z77) Motherboard Review (Page 4)

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.

Having a look above you can see our testbed which hasn't changed over the last few months as we work our way through the large line up of Z77 boards which we were sent for review. With that ultimately covered, let's quickly cover the boards that will be in our graphs today starting of course with the ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77, which will be ran at stock and overclocked speeds. We'll look at the overclocked numbers in just a second.

We've also got the ASRock Z77 Extreme6 present alongside the X79 Extreme4. Another couple of ASUS boards are also included in the form of the Maximus IV Extreme-Z and the Maximus V GENE to round off our motherboard line up today.

With stock testing done it was time to head into the BIOS which I have to say took a lot of attempts; no fault to ASUS, though. Something I noticed with this board is the boot time was extremely fast. I don't think I've missed hitting the "DEL" key to enter the BIOS so many times in previous testing of motherboards.

Getting into the BIOS, though, we started messing around with the voltages and multiplier. We started at 47x which brought our CPU in at 4.7GHz. We got up and running in Windows without an issue. With that done it was then time to miss pressing the "DEL" key a few times before getting back into the BIOS.

The next step as always is that we move to a 48x multiplier which adds another 100MHz. We booted up with no issue and got into Windows, but when we started the MediaEspresso encode, the program crashed straight away. Now with a bit of baring in where we can end up it was time to do a little bit of fine tuning.

Moving back to the 47x multiplier we started to play around with the BLCLK to see just what kind of overclock we could land on. Looking above you can see we landed at 100.6 which with the 47x multiplier gave us a clock speed of 4728MHz or 4.73GHz as illustrated in our graphs here today.

Let's get started!