ASRock Z77 OC Formula Review: Living In The Fast Lane

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:

OCZ for donating the 1250W Gold 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
ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs

Test Setup

Alongside our normal testing procedure, we also ran the computational and gaming benchmarks at an overclocked setting based on our overclocking results: an i7-3770K at 4.8 GHz and 2800 MHz on the memory.

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.

While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers.  These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.

A motherboard designed for overclocking such as the Z77 OC Formula does not necessarily have to use less power, but efficiency is often a key element when designing such a product.  Nevertheless, the Z77 OC Formula does a great job in our power tests while holding two 7970s, featuring near the bottom end of the table in all of them.

POST Time

Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized.  A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized).  As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.)  These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.

Unfortunately the Z77 OC Formula misses out on a great 12 second POST time, albeit not by much.  For an overclocking board, it is often helpful to have that quick POST time when changing a lot of settings repeatedly or encountering BSODs during benchmarks.