ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Review: A Bentley Among Motherboards
by Ian Cutress on August 13, 2012 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Asus
- Z77
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:
OCZ for donating the Power Supply and USB testing SSD
Micron for donating our SATA testing SSD
G.Skill for donating our memory kits
ASUS for donating AMD GPUs and some IO testing kit
and ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs
Test Setup
| Processor |
Intel Core i7-3770K ES 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.5 GHz (3.9 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards |
ASRock Z77 Extreme4 ASRock Z77 Extreme6 ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional ASUS P8Z77-V Pro ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Biostar TZ77XE4 Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-D3H MSI Z77A-GD65 |
| Memory | G.Skill F3-19200CL9Q-16GBZMD |
| Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series |
| Cooling | Intel All-in-One Liquid Cooler |
| Hard Drive | Micron RealSSD C300 256GB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed - CoolerMaster Lab V1.0 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit |
| SATA Testing | Micron RealSSD C300 256GB |
| Thunderbolt Testing | LaCie Little Big 240GB |
| USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a dual 7970 GPU configuration. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
Power consumption on the Premium is markedly higher than any other Z77 motherboard we have tested. This is attributed presumably to the extra controllers on board - the PLX 8747 and the Thunderbolt controller perhaps being the culprits if they are unable to power gate themselves down, as well as the mSATA SSD. The ASUS P8Z77-V Premium also features an enhanced power phase system to maintain stability, which may be another factor.
Note: In our future PLX 8747 review, we find that these power results are a common sight on PLX 8747 motherboards.
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ptrinh1979 - Tuesday, August 14, 2012 - link
I was confused as well, but in my case, I can use this to offload the pagefile without sacrificing a drive bay in my chassis.BytesMage - Tuesday, September 11, 2012 - link
Page file is good for this. Planning on raiding 2 SSDs in raid 0 on Intel then SSD cache ll on the marvel with 2 60gb SSDs to 3tb HDD. I was wondering what to do with the 32gb mSata.ASUSTechMKT - Tuesday, August 14, 2012 - link
The 32GB mSATA was integrated to allow for quick access to utilizing Intel SSD Caching functionality. While many users are adopting high performance SSDs the cost of higher capacities is till high and in addition limited. Mechanical drives still considerably outpace and outsell SSDs in integration in all price points of desktops. Having this 32GB drive integrated easily allows for you to "SSD Cache a 2, 3 or 4TB drive" this allows you to have a much smoother and quicker response experience from the mechanical volume.While not noted the setup has also been streamlined in our utility to allow for a quick one click level of initialization for Intel SSD Caching or ASUS SSD Caching from the Marvell controller.
Rick83 - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
At this price point, that is fairly ridiculous.So yes, there is "Thunderbolt", but a Firewire 800 Controller would probably be more useful, as there are way more Firewire devices in the wild than Thunderbolt.
Not sure how much the 82579V really can be called "server grade" either.
The 82579V on the Gene-Z shouldn't be all that different, having the same designation, but you have to manually hack the .inf to get the driver to install on Windows server. Not sure what makes this one server grade, seeing as the broken .inf comes directly from Intel.
Checking the other NIC, that one is more likely to be server grade, it costs almost twice as much. Not sure who made that mix-up.
IanCutress - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
This was my error. The 82583 is not server grade, but as a helpful reader pointed out via email, the 82571, 82572, 82574, 82576, 82580 and I350 are. Super helpful naming scheme to tell them apart... :)Ian
Googer - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
Thunderbolt is capable if mimicking firewire and just about every other IO technology in existence. So there is no real need for the added PCB Real Estate or monetary expense of a 1394 chip when 1394b is something that never really caught on (SAD).bigboxes - Tuesday, August 14, 2012 - link
Give up on the firewire. It's got USB 3.0. & USB 2.0. Anything you might need beyond that will either be Thunderbolt or some future USB 4.0. I've never needed Firewire. I've wasted money on a Firewire card, but that's not the same thing as needing it, now is it?Rick83 - Tuesday, August 14, 2012 - link
There's a lot of Firewire Video stuff (I'm following the IEEE1394-Linux mailing list, and there is still development and occasional use in a variety of contexts) Also I have a FireWire CF-reader. Not to mention that it's still much cheaper than TB, and in the shape of FW-800 still bloody fast, thanks to physical DMA.Also, at 450 euro, there's just no reason not to mark that check-box. Thunderbird is NOT a drop-in replacement. It's not like there's no space left on the back plane.
I actually had a look at the P8C WS yesterday evening, and it seems that that board is what this board should be, at half the price.
Two server grade NICs, FireWire, DVI out, support for ECC MEM and Xeons.
No WiFi, Thunderbolt, SSD or PLX though, but then those are probably less useful to (me and) most people, than the aforementioned.
Oh and it has 4x SATA less. But then 10x SATA is what my much cheaper GigaByte P55-UD5 has, and had years ago (Yes, they're all in use - Yes I'm looking at the WS because I've been having issues (kernel panics, NICs misbehaving) with it lately and server NICs and ECC probably are a good idea after all)
BoloMKXXVIII - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
I have to agree with others who are a bit confused why a 32 GB SSD was included. As for the rest of the board, I will keep an eye out for when this board starts dropping in price. It is bound to happen. As long as it doesn't take too long it could fit well into my near future plans.Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
Any idea how the Marvell 9230 SATA 6Gbps controller performs? Marvell's previous controllers haven't been too great, so I'm curious to know if the 9230 is any better.