ASRock Z77 Extreme6 Motherboard w/ Intel i7-3770K Review

1. Introduction2. ASRock Z77 Extreme6: Packaging and Bundle3. ASRock Z77 Extreme6: Layout and Features4. ASRock Z77 Extreme6: BIOS5. ASRock Z77 Extreme6: Overclocking6. Testing Methodology7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: PCMark 710. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark11. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201212. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.513. Synthetic: Super Pi14. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Real World: MKV Playback17. Gaming: DiRT 318. Gaming: Grand Theft Auto IV: EFLC19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

Everything considered, we are left with very positive impressions of the ASRock Z77 Extreme6 motherboard which is clearly targeted at the high end of the market. The extensive feature set and excellent overclocking headroom are sure to whet the appetites of most enthusiasts and the black and gold colour scheme should fit in aesthetically with most components, appealing to those who care deeply about the aesthetics of their system.

The ASRock Z77 Extreme6 let us achieve some quite impressive overclocks with the Intel Core i7-3770K. We were very pleased that we managed to hit 5.0 GHz using air cooling but unfortunately this wasn't stable. The maximum stable overclock we achieved was 4.9 GHz using a CPU voltage of 1.35V. That said, we found that this chip got very hot when pushing the volts past 1.25V and, at 1.35V, we felt that the temperatures of 80 – 90 degrees C were too high for every day usage.

For our tests we set the CPU to 4.7 GHz using the automatic ‘Turbo30 option in the BIOS. This is great for those users who don't have the confidence or know-how to achieve a good overclock on their own using manual settings. We wouldn't recommend pushing this chip past 4.6 GHz without a high-end air cooler, though, as it requires a lot of volts to achieve higher clock speeds and low-end air coolers simply won't be able to deal with the heat.

It's clear that the new Ivy Bridge architecture offers better performance than Sandy Bridge clock for clock looking at our benchmark results. However, the difference is relitavely small and the i7-2700K can be pushed further when overclocking so we don't think that it's necessarily worth upgrading for those users who already have all singing, all dancing Sandy Bridge based systems.

There's no denying that the i7-3770K is an improvement over the i7-2700K and it's definitely worth buying if you're planning to build a new system. One of the key areas in which it trumps the i7-2700K is in power consumption where it recorded substantially lower results under load.

It's not yet clear how much the i7-3770K will cost you as it wont be available via the channel for another week but we estimate that it will be around the £249.99 inc. VAT mark.

The ASRock Z77 Extreme6 is an excellent choice if you're looking to build an Ivy Bridge based system. It's available from Aria for £148 inc vat.

KitGuru says: An impressive motherboard that is the perfect partner for the Intel Core i7-3770K.

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