Asus P8Z77-V PRO ATX Intel Motherboard

I bought my first Ivy Bridge chip and this motherboard to go with it. On paper the specs looked really impressive. The power phase design, heatsinks, VRMs, onboard wi-fi, it all looked really impressive.

My first issue was with flashing the BIOS, I had a couple of issues with unsuccessful flashing or flashing and my SSD would no longer work. I tried multiple SSDs, the solution was unplugging all the SATA drives while flashing the BIOS. I never experienced this on any other build so I thought it was quirky.

When overclocking the CPU I would set everything in BIOS and then 90% of the time I would get to windows and my CPU would be running 3.8GHz no matter what I set it to in BIOS. I tried the 3 most recent BIOSes and they didn't fix the issue for me. The only solution was setting the frequency in Windows with AI Suite II. Kind of disappointing.

These first two issues I thought were just bad luck, I encountered a handful of people on this Forum with the same issues. Very disappointing for an almost $200 board.

After about 40 days my sound chip died on me and I had to use a dedicated sound card. At this point I had enough and RMA'd with ASUS. When I get a replacement, hopefully these issues are fixed, but I will likely just hold on to my ASRock Extreme6.

Introduction:

A while ago I upgraded from AMD to an Intel 3570K. I wanted a board that offered the latest features, ease of use and great overclocking. So I chose the P8Z77-V Pro.

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Review:

The board came well packaged, and comes with lots of accessories, from which all I used were the Sata cords and the Wireless antenna.

The build was straight forward, I installed the RAM, the Processor and the cooler, mounted the board, then installed the GPU and sound card. Everything went smooth with this board, and it mounted into the case just fine.

It's a standard ATX board, so it will fit in almost all Mid and Full tower cases, given that they have 7 expansion slots.

I love the touch BIOS on this motherboard. It was extremely easy to work with and to find all the important settings. Overclocking was as simple as raising the voltage a bit, and increasing the multiplier. This board has a great VRM design, with good cooling.

The colour scheme is matte black, with blue highlights. It looks very appealing in my White NZXT Switch 810, and fits in with the rest of my components well.

The board supports up to 32GB of DDR3 memory, has two PCI-E 16x lanes, and a single 4x lane, it has two PCI slots, and a single PCI-E 1x slot. There are 8 Sata ports in total, four a Sata 3 and four a Sata 2.

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Conclusion:

I like this board alot. It has done everything I wanted it to do, and surpassed my expectations. If you're in the market for some quality hardware, I recommend this motherboard.