ASRock Z77 OC Formula (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 our testbed and we won't go into any real detail as everything is really covered above. Instead we'll get into the overclocking side of things to see just how we went with our Intel 3770K CPU today.

We have a good idea what our 3770K is capable of which is around the 4.7GHz mark with Corsair H100 cooling. But I thought we'd go for the 4.8GHz profile and straight away we booted without an issue. Unfortunately when it was time to get into Windows we just couldn't and found ourselves greeted with a black screen.

It's clear that our 3770K doesn't want to get into the 4.8GHz range so we just jumped to the 4.7GHz profile which we had hoped wouldn't run into any problems. As we assumed we ran into no problems at all and got into Windows straight away.

We ended up heading back into the BIOS and started to mess around with the BCLK to see if we could get much more out of it, but unfortunately we didn't have a whole lot of luck. We got into Windows around the 4.77GHz mark, but ran into problems when we started benchmarking under Media Espresso, which is known to show stability issues with overclocking.

Looking above you can see we ultimately end up with a fairly even 4.7GHz overclock. I think the one piece of information that has to be noted, though, is that this is the easiest 4.7GHz overclock we've ever achieved. All we did was load Nick's profile and we got ourselves up and running in Windows without a single issue.

Let's get started!