ASRock Z77 Extreme 4: How to get the best out of it?

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panamavibes

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Jul 10, 2012
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Last year after a catastrophic failure of my Intel DSO mobo and i7 processor (nobody could tell which of the two was bad so I had to dump the mobo, memory and processor) I bought an ASRock Z77 Extreme 4 motherboard.

Since my triple channel DRAMS where damaged I bought a single 4GB DRAM For the new mobo (ASRock) which has an Intel i7-3770 @ 3.4GHz. I also replaced the primary hard drive to a SATA3 HD and connected to the SATA3 connector on the mobo. The other hard disk is a SATA2 and is connected to the SATA2 connector.

Now my System Index was 5.9 limited by the lowest factor. I upped my system memory to 12GB which upped my Memory score from 5.9 to 7.7.

Unfortunately my overall Windows score remains 5.9:

Processor: 7.7 an Intel i7-3770 at 3.4GHz (no overclock)
Memory: 7.7 with 1x8GB (1600) plus 1x4GB (1333)
Graphics: 7.4 with an old nVidia GeForce GTX285
Gaming Graphics: 7.4
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9 SATA 3 1TB

So basically my limiting factor is the primary disk. I thought SATA3 would get me a better rating overall but it is weakest chain. Without having to buy a solid state HD, what can I put there to increase my Windows score?
 
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Sakkura

Sakkura

Illustrious
Aug 22, 2011
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Nothing. No regular hard drive is fast enough to run into the limitations of SATA2. SATA3 is only an advantage for SSDs. So whether a regular hard drive is SATA2 or SATA3 doesn't matter in itself.

By the way, Windows scores are not that important.
 
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tachybana

tachybana

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Feb 11, 2013
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By the looks of it you have great system there. Is it acting up? Dont' get caught up on the whole windows experience index. I've seem some Uber systems, score below 7.9.

How much are disk space do you have available?
 
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4745454b

4745454b

Titan
Moderator
Apr 29, 2006
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All mechanical drives score 5.9 at best. This is why most of us don't care about WEI. It should be based on how fast the drive is. My 4TB hdd can hit 180MBps which is faster then most drives, but still scores a 5.9. (I have two SSDs in my system btw, don't feel bad for me.)

Your ram might be ok, I'd try it in the new system. And unless you are having issues I wouldn't worry about WEI or anything else.
 
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panamavibes

Honorable
Jul 10, 2012
15
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10,510
The system is acting fine with the 12GB unpaired DRAM (which the system shows in BIOS as "dual channel" which is NOT).

It is a good system as I do software development and flight simulation. When I do s/w I usually have MANY aChrome tabs open, Visual Studio open and sometimes Eclipse (Android) open as well.

I have two internal disks each of 1TB. SSD is way to expensive for me and would run out very quickly considering the amount of software I have installed on my system. I am using 144GB of my C drive but most of my user data (Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos) have been moved to D: leaving only the "hidden" Roaming, App_Data and things like that in the C Partition.
 
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