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

The ASRock UEFI interface makes overclocking very simple with the Z77 Extreme6 motherboard. We are forced to overclock the system using the multiplier rather than the baseclock with Ivy Bridge as there is little leeway in the baseclock. The maximum fully stable overclock we managed to achieve with the i7-3770K was 4.9 GHz using a core voltage of 1.35V. This may not seem like a lot of volts when we consider that Sandy Bridge chips could be pushed to 1.5V on air but the Ivy Bridge chips run much hotter with the same voltage level due to the die shrink to 22nm. See validation over here.

With the core voltage set at 1.35V, the core temperatures were approaching 90 degrees C when we loaded the system with Prime95. We think that this is a little too hot for every day use so we decided to use the Turbo30 automatic overclocking mode for our benchmarks. This clocked the i7-3770K to 4.7 GHz using a voltage just shy of 1.30V. See validation over here.

We managed to overclock the system to 5.0 GHz during our tests which required us to disable hyper threading and to  bump the voltage to 1.375V. The system wasn't completely stable with this overclock and the temperatures were very hot. As the Phanteks PH-TC14PE is one of the best air coolers you can buy, we expect that a custom watercooling loop would be required to keep the temperatures at bay when the chip is overclocked to this level. See validation over here.

It was very easy to achieve an overclock of 4.6 GHz with the i7-3770K and this only required a core voltage of about 1.25V. My colleague Zardon achieved 4.6 GHz with a relatively inexpensive Arctic Freezer 13 CPU cooler which only costs about £20. Those looking to push their system further than this will need to invest in a high end air cooler or water cooling.

When overclocking the i7-2700K in this motherboard we were also able to achieve 5.0 GHz using a core voltage of 1.45V. We didn't have to disable hyper threading to achieve this overclock and the temperatures were much lower than they were when overclocking the i7-3770K to this level. We expect that the i7-2700K could be pushed further with more voltage but we wanted to concentrate on overclocking the i7-3770K in this review. See validation over here.

We also clocked the i7-2700K to 4.7 GHz for our benchmarks to provide a clock for clock comparison with the i7-3770K. We used a core voltage of 1.30V to achieve this overclock. See validation over here.

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