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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
43 Comments
View All Comments
ASUSTechMKT - Tuesday, August 14, 2012 - link
It offers considerably better performance first generation 9128 and 9120 and 9130 were not bad controller just limited in peak throughput but keep in mind the controller was put to market before Intel even had SATA6G PCH. Also keep in mind performance for real world usage ( boot time, application launch performance, copy performance is pretty similar between then it is only in benchmarks you will see a measurable difference. That being noted the x2 interconnect offers twice the throughput for considerably improved performance vs the x1 interconnect 9128 type solutions. This allows newer SATA6G drives to generally perform on about the same level as the Intel PCH ( peak performance being at / near or above 500MBs on fast controllers ). Additionally it has some specific advantages not noted in the review such as stacked SSD caching. This allows up to 3 SSDs to be stacked on a mechanical drive to continue to enhance its performance.Hope this clarifies it for you.
infoilrator - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
On any top price product certain features are necessary, useful or not, on a "has" basis.Minor omissions (in the would be nice category) would be a card reader in the front USB3.0 Device, and a PCIe expansion card with 2 firewire and 2 USB2 or USB3 plugs.
After all, too much is not enough, $450 should not require further shopping for minor add ins.
The price, if you have full use for the "package" seems acceptable, not that I'll ever have it.
TimoKyyro - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
I would have liked to see GPU rendering benchmarks with SmallLuxGPU or Blender. This board would be perfect for animation rendering with 2 x PCIe 3.0 x16 for dual GTX 690 or 4 x PCIe 3.0 x8 for quad GTX 680.The price doesn't matter if I get faster GPU rendering and better support for new technologies like PCIe 3.0 and Thunderbolt.
IanCutress - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
Unfortunately I do not have access to those GPUs.Ian
rahvin - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
Are the eSATA ports port multiplier capable?mayankleoboy1 - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
it would be great to see a PCIE3.0 SSD for tests and if it can take advantage of the extra bandwidth.DigitalFreak - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
There is no "extra bandwidth". You're still limited to the x16 connection to the CPU.jwcalla - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
$450???If you want to set yourself apart, how about supporting something useful like ECC RAM and 10 GbE?
Until you can do ethernet over Thunderbolt, I don't really see the point of TB on a motherboard like this.
And 10+ SATA ports... that would only be used in a file server context. But that requires ECC RAM. So it doesn't add up.
JMO.
jwcalla - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
* Ahh yes I forgot that desktop Intel chipsets don't support ECC RAM so they can charge more for their server-based motherboards and processors.Even Cortex A-15 supports ECC. *sigh*
This space needs some serious competition. It's just the same boring features rehashed and multiplied.
Kevin G - Monday, August 13, 2012 - link
There are a few TB -> Ethernet solutions out there, including an adapter from Apple. Though with two NIC's on the board, I'm not really use-case scenario for TB on this particular motherboard. I can only fathom fast external storage and at that point the user would be better off with a solid SAS card with external connectivity.As for ECC, Intel does indeed limit their desktop processors. A handful of motherboards will support ECC if a socket 1155 Xeon is utilized. Though if ECC is critical, AMD's FX line supports ECC and up to the motherboard manufacturers to support it.