ASRock Z77E-ITX Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. ASRock Z77E-ITX: Packaging and Bundle3. ASRock Z77E-ITX: Layout and Features4. ASRock Z77E-ITX: BIOS and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: 3DMark 117. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage8. Synthetic: PCMark 79. Synthetic: PCMark 710. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201211. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.512. Synthetic: Super Pi13. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark14. Real World: Media Encoding15. Real World: MKV Playback16. Gaming: DiRT 317. Gaming: Grand Theft Auto 4 EFLC18. Technical: Power Consumption19. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

UEFI Interface

ASRock have used their familiar UEFI interface for the Z77E-ITX.  We love this interface and it's almost as good as the Asus UEFI which we regard to be the best on the market.

The first page lists some basic information about the motherboard and the installed components.

Most enthusiasts will head straight for the ‘OC Tweaker' page which contains all the settings we could possibly ask for to squeeze every ounce of performance out of this motherboard.  It also features an automatic overclocking feature which will be useful for less technically advanced users.

Under the ‘Advanced' tab we find a number of further pages which contain the non-overclocking BIOS settings.  We can also access the ASRock Instant Flash utility from this page.

On the ‘H/W Monitor' page we can see some information about the system temperatures, voltages and fan speeds.  We can also set the fan speeds here.

The next two pages feature the boot and security options and the last page lets us exit the BIOS, either saving changes or discarding them.  We can also reset the BIOS to the default settings here.

Overclocking

In the past we have had limited success overclocking with mini-ITX motherboard as the power regulation circuitry often isn't good enough to achieve a solid overclock.  ASRock have clearly been trying to buck this trend though as the UEFI interface features all the overclocking settings we could ask for.

First of all we decided to try out the automatic overclocking feature which is called ‘Advanced Turbo 30'.  With our Intel Core-i7 3770K this boosted the clock speed to 4.7 GHz using a baseclock of 100 MHz and a ratio of 47x.  We were pleasantly surprised to find that this was completely stable during our tests.

See validation here

We weren't actually able to achieve a manual overclock better than the 4.7  GHz achieved by the automatic feature but this is still a very impressive result for a mini-ITX motherboard.  We've tested a number of full size ATX motherboards and none of them hit 4.7 GHz with less effort.

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