ASUS P8-Z77V Pro Sandy Bridge Review

Test Setup

Today we're taking a look solely at the ASUS P8-Z77V Pro as an upgrade option for current owners of LGA1155 systems, and to that end we'll be using our current i5-2500K setup to see if the Z77 has enough to justify the switch.

Throughout the Z68 testing we utilised our little Corsair SSD as a cache drive via the Intel Rapid Storage Technology option that is available throughout the LGA1155 range. As we're moving into the 3rd Generation of Intel CPUs, and the price of a basic SSD is now easily within reach of everybody we have swapped to using our Corsair Force F80 SSD as the backbone of our test setup. The reasons are two-fold. Firstly IRST gets close to SSD speeds anyway, and secondly we didn't want to move to something fiercely expensive and high-end, but rather keep to the principles of testing something within the financial reach of everyone, which matches the strategy Intel have for the LGA1155 based systems. Hence the SATA II Corsair Force F80.

ASUS P8 Z77V Pro
Intel Core i5-2500K
Kingston Genesis 2133MHz
EVGA GTX570
ForceWare 296.10
Cougar CM1000 PSU
Corsair F80 SSD
Thermalright Silver Arrow
Windows 7 x64

Overclocking

Because we're using the 2nd Generation i5-2500K we're still stuck at around 100 BCLK and mainly relying on multipliers to get the overclocking done. The AI Tweak software brought us to 4.3GHz which is pretty good for a automatic overclocking option, but manually overclocking will always reap larger rewards and so it was here with a final CPU rating of 4.8 GHz. 

This was stable in all of our testing except for PC Mark 7, and so we had to back off a little to pass all of our tests down to 4.7GHz. Considering that only a minor voltage tweak and an increase in the multiplier was necessary it's proof once again that Sandy Bridge really is so easy to get a decent overclock out of it's almost like Intel are encouraging us.