ECS, known for its motherboards, just announced a 14-inch laptop powered by an unreleased AMD Krackan processor. According to the press release, the processor in this laptop called the ECS UP42KP, will feature eight Zen 5(c) CPU cores, RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics, and an NPU that delivers more than 40 TOPS of performance. The Krackan Point chips are AMD’s budget alternatives to the Strix Point processors it launched in mid-2024, and we expect laptops with these CPUs to start at $799 and have Copilot+ branding.

ECS said the UP42KP will have features including a TDP range of 15 to 45 watts, support for DDR5-5600 RAM, Wi-Fi 6, and USB 4.0. It will also have an IR camera compatible with Windows Hello, a privacy shutter, a backlit keyboard, and HDMI 2.1. All this is packed in a sleek metal chassis that’s just 16.9mm thick and has a 14-inch Full HD screen.

Unfortunately, ECS hasn’t released pricing for this new laptop model, especially since it’s primarily an OEM instead of a laptop retailer. That means we will probably see the ECS UP42KP on store shelves under a different brand name. Furthermore, the brands that eventually carry the UP42KP in their lineup could tweak the specifications to change its features and pricing. Nevertheless, since ECS is targeting this model for the mainstream mid-range market, we expect it to be priced somewhere between $700 and $1,000.

ECS is releasing Snapdragon X-powered laptops, too

In addition to the AMD Krackan-powered UP42KP, ECS will launch the UP42PW and UP52PW, a 14-inch and 15.3-inch laptop with a Snapdragon X Plus processor. Although the company didn’t mention which model these laptops featured, ECS said they could hit a maximum turbo frequency of 3.4 GHz. That means they’re likely powered by the base Snapdragon X Plus X1P-41-100, which has a 3.2 GHz Oryon 8-core CPU that can reach a maximum single-core boost of up to 3.4 GHz.

These laptops will have an NPU that could hit 45 TOPS, high-speed LPDDR5 memory, and enough battery life to last up to 12 hours. ECS also says these devices will have USB 4.0 and support Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC functionality. Again, the company did not release pricing as they will likely be sold under different brands. Nevertheless, these could be part of the more affordable Snapdragon X PCs that the Qualcomm CEO said will come out in early 2025.

Announced back in May, the ECS LIVA QC710 mini desktop PC based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c is now available on the Microsoft Store. Via CNX Software.

Described as a ‘developer kit’, the mini PC, which runs Windows 10 Home for Arm but can be upgraded to Windows 11, appears to be US-only and sells for $219, though students, parents, teachers and the military can get this down to $197.10. No refunds are available, however, if you don’t like it as this is more of an app test device than general consumer tech.

More of a development testbed than anything you’d actually want to develop apps on, the QC710 has a very low spec, with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and just a few ports (Ethernet 10/100, micro SD, 1x HDMI, 1x USB 2, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, and a Type-C for power) alongside Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth. It’s pitched toward silent operating and instant-on operation rather than extreme processing power. It’s pretty small, at 1.38 x 4.69 x 4.59 in (35.05 x 119.13 x 116.58 mm) and weighs just 0.51lb (0.23kg). For comparison, the M1 Mac Mini measures 7.7 inches on each side and is 1.4 inches thick, and weighs 2.9lbs.

The Snapdragon 7c is an 8nm chip with eight 64bit cores running at up to 2.4GHz, enough GPU to power 4K HDR video, and a built-in LTE modem. A Gen2 version with better clock speeds (2.55GHz) and faster memory controller was announced in May, but it’s not entirely clear which version is powering this devkit. The Snapdragon 8c, offering 3.15GHz and a better GPU on a 7nm process, is also available.

The Mini-ITX form-factor enables one to build rather compact desktops and if a PC maker wants something smaller, it goes with a proprietary form-factor. ECS has revealed a motherboard that has a width of 170 mm and a depth of 85 mm, which is about "half" of a Mini-ITX motherboard. The platform can fit into standard Mini-ITX chassis, but to take full advantage of its dimensions, one will have to use a built-to-order case. 

The ECS GLKD-HTI is based on Intel's Gemini Lake SoC with two or four Goldmont Plus cores as well as Intel UHD Graphics 600/605 (Gen 9.5). The processor can be accompanied by up to 8GB of DDR4-2133 memory using one SO-DIMM module, a single-sided M.2-2280 SSD with a SATA interface and a 2.5/3.5-inch drive featuring a SATA interface.

The ECS GLKD-HTI is a rather feature rich platform and has everything one might need for basic productivity or entertainment tasks. The motherboard is equipped with a GbE port (controlled by the Realtek 8111H) and has an M.2 slot for a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module. It also has four USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI display output as well as two audio jacks (enabled by the Realtek ALC662) to attach speakers and a microphone (or a headset).

Aside from its "Half Mini-ITX" form-factor, the main selling point of the ECS GLKD-HTI is its promise of ultimate reliability, something ECS calls the Durathon Technology. The manufacturer equipped the platform with solid-state capacitors, ESD protection as well as LAN surge protection. Meanwhile, the system is not exactly positioned as an 'embedded product', so it may not be exactly designed for commercial or industrial applications. 

Since the 'Half Mini-ITX' is not an industry standard form-factor, those interested in using the ECS GLKD-HTI will probably have to order a proprietary chassis or just get an ultra-small Mini-ITX case and use the spare room for something else, a piece of proprietary hardware, for example. Meanwhile, considering the combination of features and a nearly proprietary form-factor, it is likely that the product was designed for a client and then ECS saw its potential for a broader market. 

The ECS GLKD-HTI was formally announced on December 28 (as reported by Hermitage Akihabara) and is currently listed on manufacturer's site. Unfortunately, there is no word regarding an actual availability date or approximate price of the unit.

Of course, if you're looking for a standard motherboard, check out our list of best motherboards for advice.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) today announced two new additions to its min -PC lineup. The LIVA Z3 Plus and Z3E Plus cater to the needs of home and professional users. 

Both the LIVA Z3 Plus and Z3E Plus employ Intel's 10th Generation Comet Lake-U CPUs that come with a small 15W thermal footprint. There are four processor options for your choosing. The Core i7-10710U is a hexa-core chip, while the Core i7-10510U and Core i5-10210U are quad-core parts. The Core i3-10110U is the only dual-core option among the four 14nm processors.

At  4.6 x 5.0 inches (117 x 128mm), neither mini PC will take up a lot of valuable space on your desk. The Z3 Plus, the shorter of the two, stands at 1.4 inches (35mm). Meanwhile, the Z3E Plus is 2.1 inches (52.9mm) tall. You can choose between a silver or black chassis.

The devices come with two SO-DIMM DDR4 RAM slots, allowing you to use up to 32GB of DDR4-2400 or DDR4-2666 memory. The Z3 Plus and Z3E Plus provide a single M.2 slot for a SATA or PCIe SSD with a length up to 80mm (3.1 inches). The Z3E Plus' additional height opens the door for a 2.5-inch SSD or hard drive. Should you need it, the Z3 Plus and Z3E Plus are also said to play nicely with Intel Optane drives.

The mini PCs come with an empty M.2 2230 slot that's designed for wireless cards. ECS offers the option to include an Intel Wireless-AC 9560 adapter that offers 802.11ax networking and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity at an extra cost.

In terms of ports, each tiny system employs three USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports, one USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port and one 3.5mm combo audio jack up front. ECS incorporated four digital microphones in the front panel for voice recognition

At the rear, there are two Gigabit Ethernet ports and the DC-in connector. The Z3 Plus and Z3E Plus supplies one HDMI 2.0 port and a Mini DisplayPort output. However, the Z3E Plus model offers an optional HDMI-in connection via an embedded capture card.

There's a Kensington lock on the side of the Z3 Plus and Z3E Plus. In the latter's case, there are also two RS232 COM ports.

The Z3 Plus is available on Newegg for $564.99, while the Z3E Plus isn't in stock yet.

ECS (via Hermitage Akihabara) has cooked up the H410H6-TI2 motherboard for PC builders that want to build an AIO or slim system with Intel's 10th Generation Comet Lake-S processors.

ECS advertises the H410H6-TI2 as a thin Mini-ITX motherboard with the LGA1200 CPU socket. The motherboard still measures 170 x 170mm but comes with the novelty of having a thinner body. Thin Mini-ITX motherboards can be up to 40% slimmer than your typical Mini-ITX offering. 

The H410H6-TI2 draws power through a 19V DC-in jack at the motherboard's rear panel, eradicating the need for a power supply in the system. However, there are some limitations here. Due to the lack of proper power connectors and modest power delivery subsystem, the H410H6-TI2 can only house Comet Lake-S CPUs with a TDP (thermal design power) up to 65W.

But motherboard vendors have to make a lot of compromises to keep the thickness down on thin Mini-ITX boards. There are no heatsinks or power connectors, and the standard DDR4 RAM slots are usually replaced with SO-DIMM variants.

The two SO-DIMM DDR4 memory slots on the ECS H410H6-TI2 accept DDR4-2933 modules with a capacity up to 32GB. Storage is a bit limited too, as the motherboard only supplies two SATA III ports that are connected with the H410 chipset. However, there's one M.2 slot for an M.2 2280 SATA-or PCIe-based SSD and an additional M.2 slot for a M.2 2230 wireless card.

ECS' new motherboard features the Realtek ALC662 audio codec and has two 3.5mm audio jacks. There's one Gigabit Ethernet port available powered by the Realtek RTL8111H controller.

Display outputs on the H410H6-TI2 come in form of a HDMI port and a D-Sub port. The rear panel also exposes two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports and two USB 2.0 ports. Should you need more USB ports, the motherboard offers one USB 3.1 Gen 1 header and one USB 2.0 header for expansion.

The ECS H410H6-TI2 has yet to hit the hardware shelves, so pricing is currently unknown.

Motherboard manufacturer ECS has silently expanded its AMD portfolio. The B450AM4-M motherboard (via Hermitage Akihabara) that attempts to be one of the best motherboards to consider for consumers with very tight budgets.

The B450AM4-M is a microATX motherboard that exploits AMD's budget B450 chipset. It has a modest power delivery subsystem that conforms to a 4+2-phase design and feeds the CPU with a single 4-pin power connector. The motherboard's full processor support list wasn't available at the time of writing, but the user manual states that the B450AM4-M supports 7th Generation A-series and Athlon APUs and processors up to the second-generation Ryzen 2000-series (Pinnacle Ridge) parts with a maximum TDP (thermal design power) of 95W. This effectively closes the door on the Ryzen 7 2700X, which is rated for 105W.

ECS equips the B450AM4-M with four slots that support up to DDR4--2666 memory modules. The motherboard can hold a maximum of 64GB of memory, but that will vary from processor to processor.

The B450AM4-M comes with different expansion slots that will surely satisfy the typical consumer. There's one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot wired at x4, one PCIe 2.0 x1 slot and even one PCI slot. Thanks to the presence of the two PCIe x16 slots, the B450AM4-M can accommodate up to two AMD Radeon graphics cards in a CrossFire setup.

For storage, the board offers a combination of four SATA III ports, which support RAID 0, 1 and 10 arrays, and one M.2 M-key slot that houses PCIe- and SATA-based drives up to 80mm in length. There's another M.2 slot, but it's a E-key format for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless cards only.

ECS' B450AM4-M also features four display outputs: one HDMI 1.4a port, one DVI-D port, one D-Sub port and one DisplayPort 1.2 output. Logically, you'll need to pair the motherboard with a APU to get an image from it.

The Realtek ALC662 audio codec delivers a 6-channel high definition audio experience. A Realtek ALC1304 amplifier integrated circuit accompanies the ALC662. Sadly, there's only one 3.5mm jack though that acts as a line-out, line-in and mic-in port. The single Gigabit Ethernet port is based on the Realtek RTL8111GN controller.

Despite the segment in which the  motherboard competes, the B450AM4-M isn't short of I/O connectors. The rear panel boasts a PS/2 combo port, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports and two USB 2.0 ports. In the event that you require more USB ports, the motherboard also sports one USB 3.2 Gen 1 header and two USB 2.0 headers. The list of headers also includes two serial port and one LPT headers as well as three 4-pin fan headers.

ECS hasn't announced the pricing or availability for the B450AM4-M motherboard.

Update, May 24, 2019 1:00pm PT: ECS has re-announced the Liva SF110-A320 for Computex 2019, and provided a new specifications table, which we've added below.

Original article, April 22, 2019 10:00am PT:

Elitegroup Computer Systems, better known as ECS, on Friday announced the new Liva SF110-A320 mini-PC with your choice of a 35W AMD Ryzen APU. 

Measuring 205 x 176 x 33mm, the ECS SF110-A320 is a 1-liter mini-PC roughly the size of a book. As the model number implies, the SF110-A320 features an AM4 motherboard based around the A320 chipset. According to the listing, it supports Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5 APUs as long as they conform to the 35W envelope.

However, the quad-core Ryzen 5 2400GE and Ryzen 3 2200GE chips, as well as the latest dual-core Athlon 200GE and Athlon 220GE and 240GE CPUs meet the TDP (thermal design power) limit. While the listing only mentions Ryzen chips, it's possible the mini-PC may support these Athlon parts as well. See the relevant specs below: 

The ECS SF110-A320 features two DDR4 SO-DIMM memory slots that support a maximum capacity of 32GB and memory speeds of 2,666MHz and greater. However, there are only two storage options on this mini-PC. The M.2-2280 port can house M.2 SSDs up to 80mm, although ECS didn't specify whether it supports only SATA-based or PCIe-based M.2 SSDs or both. There's also a 2.5-inch hard drive bay in case you want to slap an old-school platter drive into the SF110-A320.

The ECS SF110-A320 has a total of six USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports and one USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port. The little guy has three display outputs: a D-Sub port, HDMI port and DisplayPort output. Internet connectivity comes in the form of a Gigabit Ethernet port and WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.2 wireless connectivity. ECS also gives customers the option to add a RS-232 port or an additional DisplayPort output. The SF110-A320 carries a tiny 90W power supply that feeds of a DC 19V / 4.74A power adapter. It also supports a VESA mount.

ECS had not yet revealed availability or pricing for the SF110-A320 by the time of publication.

Features & Layout

We’ve been flying pretty close to the sun lately, reviewing some awesome X370, B350, and X399 motherboards. High-end IO, spiffy lighting, and high overall build quality have kept our enthusiast blood vessels pumping.

But now it’s time to visit the other end of the solar system.

Does AMD’s essential A320 chipset belong in a system near you, or do higher-end mainstream and enthusiast boards make more sense? Can the ECS brand make a first impression that will sway this reviewer from the fancy RGB of more widely available boards stateside? Should anyone put a tortoise on their motherboard boxes? Let's investigate.

At first glance, the ECS A320AM4-M3 is a pleasant deviation from what you might expect given the pricing. Abandoning reds, blues, and greens, ECS uses purple to provide a subtle-yet-distinctive color throughout the outer packaging. The choice of a tortoise and a serpent accompanying the Durathon 2 branding is also an interesting departure from dragons, claws, and race cars, even if the tortoise gives our enthusiast eye some serious pause.

Flipping over to the back, the purple begins to consume a bit more real estate, but the smaller fonts and minimal logos help keep clutter to a minimum while still providing adequate descriptions. We also enjoy the Decepticon-esque logo on the box and wish that it were a bit more prominent on other aspects of the product.

Contents of the box, on the other hand, are just as we would expect from a lower-end board. Two SATA cables, a driver CD, and a manual...that’s it. This is one of the skimpiest loadouts for a board we have seen in quite some time. Granted, some of us never use the included discs, and most of us rarely require cables, but there are likely some first-time builders who will rely on the motherboard to provide the cables for their hard disks. Also, the included guide seems a bit thin, so we recommend downloading ECS’ manual from the company website.

Though we had mixed feelings about the packaging and contents, the board design itself placed our expectations on happier ground. The back panel includes VGA, DVI, and HDMI 1.4 ports for builders who want to utilize an APU, which would fit well with this target market. Two PS/2, four USB 3.0, and two USB 2.0 ports are available, a modest set of universal attachments. The ECS A320AM4-M3 is also equipped with a single gigabit Ethernet port and three ports of analog audio, on par with some of the Mini-ITX boards we’ve tested.

This MicroATX board sports a single PCIe x16 Gen3 slot for the assumed graphics card (unless you're using an APU) and a small PCIe x1 Gen2 port for use with a myriad of options from COM cards to capture cards. Placed between the two slots, the included M.2 port is routed out for PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe on Ryzen chips and a reduced lane count and speed for Athlon-branded processors.

Hopping over to the right side of the board, four angled SATA3 ports are provided, which is nice despite the reduced quantity compared to B350. A major downside to this product, though, is the choice of only two DIMM slots for memory modules. Though no overclocking is officially supported with this product, there is no upside for preventing users from using four sticks of RAM.

Going top-side, we note a rare thing: no heatsinks on the voltage regulators. This 3+2 phase design gives us our first unmodified opportunity to measure regulator temperatures with a Ryzen CPU at full load. (However, without sufficient airflow, we could be sniffing burnt silicon in our test bench before long.) Speaking of regulators, this board has a single four-pin 12V connector for additional juice for our CPU, adequate for non-overclocking tasks.

As for headers, two four-pin fan headers are available at the top and bottom of the board, along with a single RGB LED header for a likely AMD Wraith cooler or similar product. Front panel, COM, USB 3.0, and front-panel-audio headers reside on the lower edge of the board, and the silk-screening to the northeast of the front-panel header is clearly labeled with polarities for pins 1 and 2. Additional USB 2.0 headers are located directly above the SATA3 ports and below the 24-pin ATX header.

Overall, the product provides the bare minimum for even the lowest of Ryzen processors. Comparing against some of the spec material for A320, USB 3.1 Gen2 is listed nowhere on the marketing material, which is an unflattering omission. Given the lack of heatsinks on the Vregs and any sort of embellishment, the ECS M3 board will likely live its life inside of a closed case lacking any sunlight (much like this reviewer in his office during the work day).

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Firmware

UEFI – That's an Eyeful

We were not expecting to see such a colorful display inside of the ECS M3 UEFI. The Main page is a lot to digest right out of the gate, but it does contain useful information for general system health. The leftmost circle indicates operating modes that ECS preconfigures for various use cases for its product.

By default, the system comes up in Normal mode, which appears to favor a balance of performance, power consumption, and noise. “Disable” places the priority to performance and power, at the cost of sound. In the center of the screen, CPU Tctl is listed, as well as the default monitored system temperature. To the right, voltages for the CPU, DIMM, and 12V rails are listed, and available fan headers are printed out underneath the purple fan icon. At the time of our testing, the 7/12/17 UEFI was the latest; ECS has since released a newer one, and a beta BIOS with support for the AMD Raven Ridge APUs has also been made available.

Clicking into Advanced (top right) abandons the rainbow-clad icons and graphics in favor of the more traditional BIOS feel with a subtle 3D cube grid background from before. The main menu here is very barren, with a helpful text block to the top right and available options listed on the bottom right. As we prepared for testing, confirming our boot setup is straightforward as far as UEFIs go, we found the ECS driver provided fairly standard options for PXE and boot-device configurations, as well as priorities for storage locations.

As this is an A320 board, we weren’t expecting much from the M.I.B. X menu, and sure enough, no options for core overclocking are available. We are blessed with the option to bump up the frequency of our RAM, though, and DDR4-2400 is achievable for our standard test benchmarks. However, voltage controls are not accessible, nor XMP profiles, so bumping up higher than DDR4-2400 was outside of our immediate control. On the flip side, DDR4 rates are available from DDR4-666 to DDR4-3200. So solder up those external voltage supplies and go for it!

The chipset menu is another area that is lightly populated, and only the South Bridge menu provides any configurations to the user. Advanced menus do have some room to grow, with our first foray into the options with PC Health status. Smart Fan Control behaves similarly to other vendors’ solutions where PWM fans can be calibrated and placed into operating modes to fit different use cases. Various Zen options are available to the builder, like on other vendors' boards out there, and another stab at memory options is available to tighten up timings within the JEDEC spec.

Overall, the UEFI is serviceable, if not enjoyable, from our perspective. As convenient as the Main UEFI is, it would have helped to tone down the colors and pick a blue or silver theme throughout the interface. Even tying in the purple from the box would have been a better choice. Another nitpick would be to just remove the blank UEFI menus and add breadcrumbs throughout to at least drive users back to where they were. Opening up voltage controls on the DIMMs would have been an excellent addition, as would getting extra DRAM speed into the mix.

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How We Test

Unfortunately, with only two DIMM slots on this board, we can only populate the A320AM4-M3 with half of our four-DIMM set of standard 8GB DDR4-3200 Trident-Z RAM modules from G.Skill. Our cooling solution for AM4 boards is still the Corsair H110i, though we have noticed the fans are starting to knock a little bit during use, which is expected with the amount of runtime placed on the unit. The Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming powers our LG 4K monitor across the various test resolutions, supplying just enough horsepower for up to 1440p gaming at 60 frames per second. Our Ryzen 7 1700X sample still rules the roost and provides a stable 3.4GHz up to the standard rated XFR frequencies when available during our test.

Test System Configuration

Comparison Products

Application Tests & Settings

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Benchmark Results & Final Analysis

Synthetics & Applications

Surprisingly, on this installation and test run, the ECS M3 scored nearly 10% ahead of the competitors within the PCMark suite, particularly on the Home, Work, and Adobe workloads.

Sandra slowed down the hype train, with a minuscule win at arithmetic and multimedia; cryptography and memory-bandwidth workloads lagged. These Sandra results were repeatable, so we hope to not see these trends in further results.

Cinebench scores placed this ECS board in the middle of the pack. Compubench focuses more on GPU computation, and it’s good to see that our driver issues have been resolved going forward. In terms of scores, the ECS M3 is roughly 1 percentage point below the average performance for the test.

3DMark Skydiver shows interesting results, where the graphics score is notably higher than the competitors, but the combined result is pulled down by the physics score. However, relying on the GPU more with both Firestrike workloads brings us back to what we should expect from our gaming results.

Application data comes as no surprise, but the ECS sample here managed to fly under the radar with no large wins or loses. InDesign shaved a half second off when compared to the other boards, and a second here and there helps keep the ECS M3 on a viable footing going into the gaming workloads.

Test Results: Gaming

As a budget board, the ECS is aiming to provide essential functionality at a competitive price. For our bench suite, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation showed nearly 3% improved 1080p performance compared to the other samples. It struggled at the higher batch levels and detail levels at 4K, unfortunately, but do we really expect people to game at 4K on this board? Probably not.

The M3 lagged behind a few frames in F1 2015 at 1080p and Ultra details, and surged ahead at 4K Ultra for second-place finishes. It is interesting to note that the minimum frame rates were ahead (by nearly 20%) compared to the ASRock X370 Killer SLI/ac.

On the flip side, Metro at 1080p showed some much reduced performance for the ECS M3 at High presets, which might reflect some of the CPU issues seen in our previous benchmarks. Fortunately, the Very High setting helps equalize the field, and the average frame rates for all samples were within a third of a frame. Our 4K settings also showed similar results to the 1080p Very High, and all of the samples’ average frame rates deviated by less than 0.5%.

The Talos Principle favored the ECS and Gigabyte AB350N across all settings and resolutions, and this can be attributed to the game update we mentioned in the Gigabyte article. Regardless, all boards ran exceptionally well, and even 4K at Ultra is playable on this three-and-a-half-year-old GPU.

Overall, performance for the ECS A320AM4-M3 actually exceeded our expectations for such a low-end offering from a relatively small brand here in the States. For synthetics, we did observe a few key benchmarks scoring lower-than-average results, but on the flip side, application and gaming benches comported themselves well. From a combined metric, rocking 99.7% of all the averaged averages is nothing to scoff about, and it goes to prove that AMD isn’t leaving any off-the-shelf performance from the A320 platform.

Non-Overclocking, Power, Thermals & Efficiency

A brief word on overclocking: A320 does not officially support overclocking. ECS takes this to heart and completely locks out the opportunity to adjust CPU-specific variables to increase performance. On the contrary, memory speed is overclockable, but without the ability to increase voltage, most users will see a limited opportunity without DIMMs specifically binned for 1.2V at elevated data rates.

With that out of the way, our power tests here are reported as total system power draw from the wall using a Kill-A-Watt meter. As expected, each product in the chart shows very consistent results for idle, Prime95 CPU, and GPU FurMark tests. Unfortunately, as we run the complete system load test, the system is having to allocate CPU resources for completing both sets of work, thus making constant power measurements difficult with our current measurement sample rate. Averaging out each use case results in system power draws all within 3W of each other. With reduced functionality and IO on the system, we were hoping that the A320 chipset would be a little more efficient, but maybe that’s just a testament to the chipset and system ecosystems as a whole.

Temperature reporting is beginning to become more stable as we standardize our AM4 test bench behind the Corsair H110i, and both the Gigabyte and ECS products conform to the standard. As expected, this 240mm AIO solution is superior to the more modest Noctua solution at lower fan speeds, and the small-form-factor cooler naturally runs very warm. However, we could foresee the Noctua SFF cooler being used on this system, as it does adequately cool the processor and provide downdraft air to the regulators. Back on topic, the ECS board also performs well for the Vregs, despite lacking the heatsinks and contact points that the other three solutions use. This bodes well for the ECS M3, in that it can be deployed in several different use cases and not fear the dreaded white smoke of a cooked regulator or thermal throttling (within reason, of course).

Efficiency, then, is really a nit-pick in our statistics at this point, with an average performance spread of only 2.4% dictating the efficiency spread by almost 1.9%. The graph may at a glance seem to represent the data in a negative light, but both the ECS and Gigabyte samples do perform well, regardless.

Value & Conclusion

At the time of this writing, a few vendors were listing the ECS A320AM4-M3’s sibling (the A320AM4-M3D) at a price of roughly $55. That, coupled with the nearly perfect average performance metric, shows a decent-size value win for the ECS. If fast-boot-enabled and set-it-and-forget-it deployment is all you need from a board, then clearly this board makes a good business case.

However, while performance keeps it in the green, the user experience is enough to make or break a product. Some purchasers want to enjoy the entire package from installation to delivery, and the ECS product is the boy you pick at dodgeball because he looks tough, but ends up getting pelted by the ball because he forgot to tie his shoes. Maybe after a few rounds or software revisions, this product could be a contender. Even investing another $20 per shippable product would yield dividends in usability and still win the value argument.

But for $50 bucks, it’s hard to complain. What you see is what you get. We could envision this product going into a build for Scrap Yard Wars or for a relative who just wants to boot a box and play Minecraft.

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ECS announced the Liva Q, the latest addition to its Liva line of all-in-one mini-PCs. Targeted for multimedia streaming and digital signage, the Liva Q’s unique selling point is its small size, which is only 7 x 7 x 3cm.

The Liva Q comes powered by either the quad-core Pentium N4200 or the dual-core Celeron N3350 processor. Both of these 7th-gen Atom SoCs (Apollo Lake) have identical connectivity. The other variables include either 2GB or 4GB of RAM (likely not expandable given the Liva Q’s size) and either 32GB or 64GB of built-in storage.

For general connectivity, the front of the Liva Q has one USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A and one USB 2.0 Type-A port. The left side has a microSD card slot that supports cards up to 128GB. On the networking front, the Liva Q has gigabit LAN (through an RJ45 jack on the back) and built-in AC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1.

As an HTPC, the Liva Q’s most important aspect is multimedia connectivity. One HDMI port is present, and ECS took care to note that it’s HDMI 2.0, so HDCP 2.2 compliance isn’t a worry. Although Apollo Lake SoCs have no issues decoding 4K h.264/5 content, neither the N4200 nor the N3350 inherently support HDMI 2.0. Existing competitors that use these SoCs circumvent this restriction by using an internal DisplayPort to HDMI converter. The Liva Q can also be triggered to turn on and off through the HDMI port that supports HDMI-CEC.

The Liva line’s competitors include the Intel NUC, Gigabyte BRIX, and Zotac ZBox lines of products.

ECS released scant details on the Liva Q’s availability. We know that it doesn’t include a Windows 10 license, but otherwise available hardware configurations and prices are unknown.

Z270-Lightsaber Layout & Features

ECS’s reputation as a value brand in the retail motherboard business goes back at least to the Pentium processor line, and a company doesn’t stick around that long without having some success. Yet ECS has also been making runs at the enthusiast market for most of its 30-year history, from its original “Extreme” line to its Black Series development, Golden Boards, and even an attempted L337 Gaming re-brand. Now that the L337 series has matured, ECS is ready to show the world that it’s more than just a value brand.

Specifications

We’re left to consider a $200 MSRP, and that price gets us many of the features that have garnered attention from ECS competitors. We find, for example, RGB LEDs, quick function onboard buttons, and a Killer network controller. We don’t find any SLI certificates, however, so anyone who wants to use two graphics cards to boost gaming performance will want to opt for CrossFire instead.

ECS even bolsters its audio selection to a full six analog jacks in addition to digital optical output, and adds a CLR_CMOS button to the I/O panel for those who prefer not to muddle around in their cases when an overclock goes awry. ECS retains four USB 2.0 and a PS/2 port for legacy peripherals, sparing a few of the chipset’s sparse HSIO pathways. There are no Type-C connectors for the USB 3.1 controller, though Type-A to Type-C cables will do the job for most things (other than thumb drives). Those two 10 Gb/s ports are fed from ASMedia’s previous-generation AMS1142 controller, sharing bandwidth over a single PCIe 3.0 lane.

Resource sparing beats sharing in that users get four PCIe x1 lanes without the need to shut any of them off to enable another interface.

Working our way around the board we find a 4-pin system fan header ahead of the I/O panel audio jacks, a 14-phase voltage regulator with LED activity strip, a 4-pin CPU fan header, a function button for the adjacent 3-character LED display, power and reset buttons, another 4-pin system fan header, a USB 3.0 front-panel header, a PCIe x4 U.2 port, six forward-facing SATA ports, a dual BIOS switch next to two firmware ROMs, a ROM Backup button to copy the active ROM to the backup ROM, a single-row USB 2.0 header (supporting one port),  a standard double-row USB 2.0 header, a BIOS update button, a BIOS Set button, an Auto O/C button, two more 4-pin fan headers, and the front-panel HD-Audio header. The LED code selector switches the 3-character display between post codes, CPU voltage, DIMM voltage, CPU temperature, and PCH temperature.

While the BIOS Set button lets you power up directly to UEFI, the BIOS Update and Quick OC buttons each require you to enter Windows and press the button before manually rebooting.

The first and second x16-length slots are automatically switched from x16/x0 to x8/x8 modes whenever a card is placed in the second slot, and a row of four 2-lane PCIe switches between them handles that task. The third long slot grabs four lanes from the Z270, sharing bandwidth with everything else, including storage, on that chipset through a four-lane pathway to the CPU. Speaking of storage, the U.2 port supplements a single M.2 slot.

Of the numerous LEDs scattered about the Z270-Lightsaber, only the two next to the rear edge have RGB control. The rest, including status and switch lighting, are monochrome. The two RGB LEDs are synchronous, and there are no headers for RGB strips.

The Z270 Lightsaber includes four SATA cables, an I/O shield, a driver disc, and a user guide.

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Firmware & Overclocking

The latest Z270-Lightsaber firmware is dated 04/06/2017, but it’s not likely an accurate build date, since the boards weren’t around back then. It could be the date of the core firmware upon which ECS’ modifications were applied, however.

The Z270-Lightsaber UEFI isn’t hotkey enabled, so navigation requires using either a mouse or arrow keys. Clicking the “Advanced” button above (or navigating by arrow key to it and hitting “Enter”) brings us to traditional BIOS-style menus.

The “Advanced” tab is the first place we need to stop, since the firmware’s default settings don’t support PCIe boot discs such as our Toshiba/OCZ M.2 SSD. The necessary change will be found under its SATA Configuration sub-menu.

It’s OK to leave RAID mode enabled, but getting the board to recognize PCIe-based storage requires disabling Intel RST on “Port 17.” The bottom of the screen shows M.2 as “Not Present” but appears to be referring to SATA-based drives.

Fan settings are found under the PC Health Status sub-menu of the Advanced menu. Custom slopes can be configured using temperature settings and math. The board’s fan control is compatible only with PWM fans.

Overclock settings are found under the ECS Motherboard Intelligent BIOS X menu, which also has a short list of detected stats.

Capable of reaching 4.80 GHz at 1.300V at optimal conditions, our CPU scaled to only 4646 MHz at 46x 101 MHz on the Z270 Lightsaber using that same voltage setting. This appears to be a good place to mention the board’s Quick-OC button, which brought us 4726 MHz at 45x 105 MHz using a 1.32V CPU core setting. It appears voltage sag (aka “vdroop” by seasoned overclockers) of up to 80mV at full AVX-based CPU load was the cause for CPU core overclocking shortfalls.

The Z270-Lightsaber includes a complete set of memory timing controls, but doesn’t fully support the high DDR4-3866 rating of our G.Skill test modules. Switching from Default Profile to Custom Profile left default CAS 15 timings, but switching from XMP Profile to Custom Profile caused the board to keep the XMP timings of these modules. With those in place, the board was stable up to DDR4-3333 with two modules, and DDR4-3232 with four modules.

The Z270-Lightsaber Over Voltage sub-menu has no “Loadline Calibration” setting, and actual voltage was a mere 1.22V under full CPU load at our 1.30V setting. The “Quick OC” setting of 1.32V likewise dropped to around 1.24V under full CPU load.

The DRAM setting above of 1.340V produced a meter reading of 1.355V at the DMM slot. That’s our test limit, as allowing a manufacturer to play excessively with voltage could give it an unfair advantage when comparing stability.

The surprisingly sparse RGB LED sub-menu is found under the overclocking main menu, which is equally surprising. Another surprise is that this RGB board has only two color-controlled LEDs, and no RGB light strip headers.

Users can save their complete set of firmware customizations as a profile for later retrieval, which could come in handy if you’re forced to use the CLR_CMOS button on the Z270-Lightsaber’s I/O panel.

Speaking of CLR_CMOS, the Z270-Lightsaber takes around 30 seconds to boot after firmware is cleared, and only resumes normal operation after the user has entered UEFI and saved settings. That can be a problem, because the board often hangs upon pressing the Delete key to enter setup the first time. We were typically forced to power cycle the system 2-3 times before being able to enter UEFI and save the initial configuration.

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How We Test

A $200 MSRP puts the Z270-Lightsaber at odds with some major competition, including the ROG Strix Z270E Gaming from Asus. The $190 MSI Z270 Gaming M5 and $180 ASRock/Fatal1ty Z270 Gaming K6 round out our charts, using our complete Kaby Lake Test configuration to gauge performance and comparative overclocking capability.

(Note: Prices reflected immediately below are real-time, or dynamic prices and may not reflect the prices we quote in the text, which are based on MSRP.)

The range of Z270-Lightsaber’s overclock settings appears adequate in comparison to other boards, but its CPU core voltage is far less granular. We can’t imagine many people will be pleased to jump straight from 1.25V to 1.30V, particularly when some cores operate best from a heat-to-performance perspective at 1.28V.

Test System Configuration

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Benchmarks & Final Thoughts

Synthetic Benchmarks

We’ve nearly eliminated variations in motherboard performance by disabling auto-overclocking cheats and enabling all available power savings features for our CPU, thus giving readers who like to set their own overclocks a reasonable clock-for-clock performance validation. ECS’ losses in 3DMark’s graphics scores come as surprise, though its combined scores appear perfectly reasonable.

Sandra’s tests show the Z270-Lightsaber performing exactly as expected at the component level, yet once again we find a hiccup in Cinebench. These are all synthetic benchmarks, and we can only hope that actual applications will prove more revealing.

3D Games

The Z270-Lightsaber excels in most of our games, showing only the smallest of losses in the most graphics-constrained of our two Metro LLR tests. The Z270 Gaming M5’s Talos results were impacted by its use of Nahimic’s 3D positional audio solution, and our review showed that it would have won without that software.

Timed Applications

The Z270-Lightsaber produces average overall performance across our mixture of timed applications, its small leads offset by its tiny losses.

Power, Heat, & Efficiency

Reduced power consumption may be the best feature of the Z270-Lightsaber, its 20W power savings under full load enough to light my office or even power another, far less complex PC. Less heat comes out when less power goes in, so that the Z270-Lightsaber also had the lowest CPU temperature.

We use our complete test history to calculate efficiency, so the Z270-Lightsaber competes with everything from power-hungry premium boards to mini-ITX lightweights in this evaluation. Coming up just 0.1% below our Z270 average in performance, the Z270-Lightsaber leverages its low power use to lift a hefty 15% gain in efficiency, compared to a baker’s dozen of previously tested models.

Overclocking Compared

The more motherboards we tested, the less sufficient ASRock’s Fatal1ty Z270 Gaming K6 appeared in CPU overclocking. The Z270-Lightsaber costs more, and is nearly as deficient as that early sample. Yet while the K6 gained a little favor by being a good DRAM overclocker, the Z270-Lightsaber fell far behind. At this price, seasoned overclockers will want to consider either the Asus ROG or MSI samples instead.

The Z270-Lightsaber’s low DRAM overclock resulted in sub-par overclocked bandwidth. Previously-shown good bandwidth at default settings means that this deficiency will matter only to overclockers.

Priced identically to the Asus ROG Strix Z270E Gaming, the ECS Z270-Lightsaber provides extremely similar performance per dollar. But features also cost money without impacting performance, and the Z270-Lightsaber includes a Killer E2500 PCIe network controller. The Asus motherboard’s Intel PHY, preferred by some users, is probably a little cheaper.

Value takes an unfortunate turn against ECS from that point. The Z270E Gaming adds a high-end Wi-Fi controller and has twice as many USB 3.1 controllers, and each of those ASM2142 controllers has twice the interface bandwidth of the Z270-Lightsaber’s solitary ASM1142. The Lightsaber’s flaunted RGB controller is completely outmoded by the Z270E Gaming’s individual-addressed LEDs, double LED-strip outputs, and elaborate firmware-based RGB LED control panel.

A great many visible features missing from the Strix Z270E Gaming are present in the Z270-Lightsaber, such as the onboard buttons and POST code display. The Z270-Lightsaber even extends that display to three characters and adds a selector switch, so users can view other things like CPU and DRAM voltage without software. The Asus board doesn’t even have a CLR_CMOS switch. Yet for many users, less-visible things like the inclusion of voltage control for all six of the Asus board’s fan headers could be equally important.

The Z270-Lightsaber’s features are all out in the open to get the attention of new builders, which could be a key sales factor in the enthusiast-value segment priced around 20% less. Yet until we see that lower price, we’re going to pass.

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Features & Specifications

Intel promotes the Z270 as the highest-model option for its mainstream LGA 1151 socket by enabling most of the features available on its silicon, yet most of those features won’t fit into a Mini-ITX form factor. You won’t, for example, run CrossFire or SLI across two cards on a board with only one slot. Overclocking becomes the prime reason to choose Z270 over H270, and even then we’re often stuck with the small voltage regulators that fit within the shorter depth of Mini-ITX.

Specifications

Features

We don’t see voltage regulator riser cards of previous-generation high-end-overclocking mini motherboards, but instead find the six basic phases associated with reduced-price Z270 boards. To be frank we don’t even see the Z270H4-I in stock at any of our regular vendors. Instead we see an MSRP for $109 for this non-Wi-Fi version. Six CPU power phases is still two or three more than we find on some H270 boards, and it even looks like a good configuration at this price.

The more we look at the Z270H4-I, the more it appears that ECS was shooting for the moon on features-for-the-price. The I/O panel has dedicated space to put a Wi-Fi module and antennas, and the board even includes the extra hardware to support the M.2 Key-E module of your choice. Remaining I/O panel space is filled with six USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 port for your legacy keyboard or mouse, DisplayPort and HDMI video outputs for the CPUs onboard graphics, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, five analog audio jacks, and a digital optical audio port. Oh, and one of the USB 3.0 ports has a Type-C connector.

We find only four SATA ports and, unlike on larger boards, we can’t cite the chipset’s HSIO limitations for the missing connections. ECS simply dedicated the space to other circuits, knowing that most builders won’t use more than four SATA drives. We also find a USB 3.0 header at the front edge and a USB 2.0 header near the I/O panel, just forward of the front-panel audio header. Everything appears laid-out to maximize CPU cooler and graphics card clearance, right down to the two fan headers along the top edge. I prefer three fan headers on a Mini-ITX board, but someone else might have preferred more SATA ports. It’s all about compromise at this price.

With the Key-E connection for Wi-Fi modules on top, ECS had to find space underneath the Z270H4-I for its Key M (M.2 SSD) connection. Two standoff locations support 60mm and 80mm SSDs, but there’s no mounting point for the longer 110mm versions.

ECS eases Wi-Fi module installation by including an antenna bracket with lead wires and antennas in the Z270H4-I’s installation kit. Two SATA cables are also included, as is the I/O shield, a driver disc, and documentation.

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Firmware & Overclocking

The Z270H4-I’s firmware opens to an easy interface which offers few options beyond basic power settings and boot priority. A switch to Advanced mode brings up additional controls. Navigation requires use of a mouse or arrow keys.

Unlike the firmware of competing brands, there isn’t even a hidden F11 or F12 function to save screenshots to a thumb drive. I instead had to use a screen capture device. Unfortunately, my screen capturer is VGA, and firmware didn’t output video using any of my VGA-capable graphics cards. I instead had to rely on a DisplayPort to VGA adapter. While not a practical problem for most end users, this did hold up the article for a short time.

Resetting firmware causes it to drop back to the firmware’s initial release date of March 9, 2017. This could be a problem with programs that rely on accurate dates for licensing purposes, and those users need to make sure to reset the motherboard clock before booting an operating system.

Booting from an M.2 drive requires jumping through the advanced menu to the SATA Configuration submenu and selecting “Not RST Controlled”. The Z270H4-I uses Intel’s SATA RAID firmware by default.

ECS’s Motherboard Intelligent BIOS X menu is the launching point for all performance-oriented settings, including CPU and DRAM overclocking. Unfortunately, its status section fails to reflect current CPU frequency.

No matter how I configured higher CPU ratios, they would revert back to default frequencies under normal operation. Programs such as Realtemp showed the set frequency (such as 4.80 GHz), while CPU-Z showed stock frequency, and a few benchmarks showed no performance gained. Overclocking via BCLK proved to be my golden ticket, so I dropped the multiplier to a non-Turbo frequency and reached 4.66 GHz at 111 MHz BCLK.

The Z270H4-I wouldn’t boot at the XMP settings of this G.Skill DDR4-3866 kit, but retaining its XMP timings was as easy as switching from XMP Profile to Custom Profile at the Memory Configuration submenu’s first option. Switching the other way, from Default to Custom, retains standard SPD timings. Oh, and that 3333MHz data rate setting combined with the 111 MHz BCLK to push the modules to DDR4-3700.

The 1.300V CPU core voltage setting appeared accurate, but the Z270H4-I has no Load Line (aka vdroop) compensation. It dropped to around 1.21V under load. Meanwhile, the DIMM voltage measured around 18mV higher at the slot than whatever was set in firmware.

The Z270H4-I lets you save your custom settings as a user profile, but the lack of any overclocking recovery means you’ll still need to reset firmware before retrieving those settings following a black screen.

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How We Test

The Z270H4-I is only the second Mini-ITX motherboard we’ve tested using this chipset, and it is priced far cheaper than the competing Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac. Our two cheapest ATX boards fill the lower portion of the chart for comparison, using our complete Kaby Lake Test configuration to gauge performance and comparative overclocking capability.

The range of Z270H4-I’s overclock settings appears adequate in comparison to other boards, but its CPU core voltage is far less granular. We can’t imagine many people will be pleased to jump straight from 1.25V to 1.30V, particularly when some cores operate best from a heat-to-performance perspective at 1.28V.

Test System Configuration

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Evaluation & Conclusion

Synthetic Benchmarks

The Z270H4-I stumbles slightly in 3DMark Graphics and makes a small comeback in PCMark’s Work score. The differences are small enough not to force a failure analysis, but are still a little puzzling given the platform’s restrictions.

Sandra Arithmetic doesn’t show any problems, but the Z270H4-I falls slightly behind the Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac in Sandra Multimedia. Cryptography and Memory Bandwidth show both boards on par, with the use of two single-rank DIMMs holding both slightly behind the four-DIMM boards when using a CPU that performs best with four ranks (or greater) of RAM.

3D Games

The Z20H4-I sails smoothly through Ashes, F1 and Metro, but stumbles slightly in Talos. Retesting didn’t reveal any trouble with the software, and the differences are still too small to cause a panic.

Timed Applications

Timed applications show zero abnormalities for the Z270H4-I, even in those that lean hard on memory or graphics performance.

Power, Heat & Efficiency

We enable all of the CPU’s power settings on each motherboard through firmware, and ECS’s Z270H4-I drew the lowest energy at full load. This could indicate that the board is a little more sensitive to the CPU’s default power envelope, which could also explain its occasional, slight benchmark losses. The lower power draw is similarly reflected in its CPU core temperature readings.

Remember we said “overall” and “slight?” The Z270H4-I consumes 16.2% lower-than-average power while producing only 1% less overall performance, when compared to all 13 previously-tested boards. That sounds like a fair trade-off to us, particularly if we were to consider putting it into a small case with tighter-than-average thermal limits.

Overclocking

Considering only its inability to hold a high multiplier would have us labeling the Z270H4-I a poor overclocker. Similarly, it’s inability to hold our desired voltage under full load would also have us looking at other options. Yet the other Mini-ITX option we’ve tested, the Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac, reached a lower ultimate frequency. Perhaps it’s time for us to lower our expectations of the Mini-ITX market?

Mediocre memory overclocking combines with the bandwidth hit of using only two ranks of RAM on a CPU that wants four. But that doesn’t need to be a problem for buyers who haven’t already picked a set of RAM: We’re just going to recommend dual-rank DIMMs for two-DIMM boards.

A low MSRP puts the hurt on ECS’s competitors, making the Z270H4-I appear to be an extreme value. Of course its overclocking limitations might cause some builders to question why they didn’t just get an H270 model in the first place.

Comparing the Z270H4-I’s features and price to those of the Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac, we see that the ASRock board has a high-end Intel 867 Mb/s 802.11ac controller and a low-end (two-lane) Thunderbolt controller. On the other hand, the Z270H4-I has a second Gigabit Ethernet port, even if it is tied to different brand of controller than its primary network port (ie, no teaming). And, the Z270H4-I is missing two SATA ports and its competitor’s third fan connection. You may tell us that you don’t need those things, or that those things don’t require the expense of an extra controller, but those “things” are still things that other people might think about.

The Z270H4-1 is $50 cheaper than the other Mini-ITX board in today’s test, and it overclocks our CPU slightly higher despite its overclocking quirks. It can’t match that competitor on features or memory overclocking, but it still reaches a fairly-fast DDR4-3700 and still has an I/O panel full of jacks. We would certainly miss not having any USB 3.1 Gen2 ports were we to use the board, but budget builders attempting to capitalize on CPU performance without overheating their smallish cases might have other priorities. Furthermore, we can’t get an actual street price on the Z270H4-I due to availability issues that persist months after its official release. Thus, while we’d like to give it our “Recommended” award based on price alone, additional considerations have limited its notoriety to a mere stamp of approval.

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At Computex, we got to see ECS’s new mini-STX motherboard up close for the first time. Although it's a fairly typical mini-STX board, ECS has one important innovation that other mini-STX OEMs do not: the option of interchangeable cases.

Thus far, all of the mini-STX motherboards we have seen can be used in just a single case each, because they do not use an interchangeable rear I/O shield. For example, Asrock and Gigabyte both use cases with pre-cut holes that perfectly mold to their respective motherboards, but those would not match up to the ports on any other mini-STX board.

This is a problem for potential system builders that would want to put together a mini-STX system, because they are limited to a single case choice for both Asrock’s and Gigabyte’s mini-STX boards. With ECS’s mini-STX board, you currently have three case options.

ECS achieved this by including a conventional rear I/O shield with its motherboards. ECS partnered with two different case OEMs to produce these first few cases. SilverStone created two of them, one of which is available in multiple colors, and the other is produced by a third company that ECS refused to reveal.

Eventually, ECS plans to bring more case designers into the loop so system builders will have a wide selection of cases to choose from for their mini-STX rigs.

There is still no word on pricing, but these systems will start to ship sometime before the end of this year.

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It has finally happened. In the mad drive to add more LEDs on everything computer related, one product finally has so many LEDs that it turned into a lightsaber! Come, young LED-loving padawans, ECS has a motherboard for you: the Z170-Lightsaber.

Even though it looks nothing like a lightsaber.

For the light show, ECS placed LEDs in several places on the Z170-Lightsaber motherboard that are capable of emitting seven different colors. The LEDs can be programed from inside of the BIOS or via a Windows application. This falls short of the RGB lighting that many gamers want nowadays, but it will likely still attract system builders.

ECS clearly tried to improve the overclocking features of the board by using a digital power design and numerous power phases. The power regulation system is passively cooled by two bulky black heatsinks connected together via a heat pipe. Although this does not guarantee that the board will overclock better than others, there should be little concern about thermal throttling due to overheated power phases, which is key to overclocking.

The motherboard also has two BIOS chips with a switch to conveniently toggle between them. This is handy if you make a mistake while overclocking, but more than anything, it should give system builders peace of mind to know that if a BIOS update or failure occurs, the PC can be functional again with the flick of a switch.

ECS opted for a more relaxed series of storage connections. The board has a total of eight SATA-III (6 Gbps) ports, one SATA Express slot and a single M.2 Key M slot.

Several motherboards have been produced recently that have two or three M.2 Key M slots. Although having more of these ports might seem useful, none of Intel’s LGA 1151 chipsets really have sufficient connectivity support to operate three M.2 Key M slots in addition to all of the other ports on the motherboard. Owing to the cost of ownership, most users are unlikely to use more than one of these devices currently anyway, so having just one M.2 slot probably won’t be an issue.

The motherboard’s audio setup is also a bit lax compared to other high-end boards. ECS didn’t say which audio codec is used, but it is placed on a segmented portion of the motherboard with several high-quality Nichicon audio capacitors.

As we don’t know the price of the motherboard yet, it is hard for us to adequately compare it to current market offerings, but the Z170-Lightsaber looks to be well-designed nonetheless. Plus, who doesn’t want to be able to say they own a lightsaber? There isn’t any word on availability yet either, but be patient padawans, it will likely be out soon.

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Introduction

Rumors that ECS would leave the branded motherboard business turned out to be unfounded, as the firm instead dropped the word “Gank” out of the branding of its latest motherboards. The L337 Gaming website is similarly fading into the background as the company focuses more of its effort on the ECS brand, and the hardware that represents it. Even though the old logo remains in spirit, L337 has transformed to LEE7.

The Z170-Claymore leads ECS’s LGA 1151 effort with all the parts and interfaces a mid-market enthusiast would want, such as dual USB 3.1 ports, a status code display for debugging, overclocking support in firmware, PCIe 3.0 M.2, and the ability to support multiple graphics cards. These specs look particularly good with regard to its mid-market $160 price.

ECS isn’t buying the hype over USB 3.1 Type-C connectors, instead outfitting the Claymore with two USB 3.1 Type A ports. This allows the ports to support many more types of devices, since most users will likely never replace their Type A to B or Micro USB cables with Type-C versions. Meanwhile, Type A to Type-C cables are likely to become commonplace as people use these to charge their phones.

Other rear-panel USB ports include four USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0, the latter making sense for at least two ports since all USB keyboards and mice use either USB 2.0 or 1.1 modes. Other keyboard and mouse options include two PS/2 ports, where most of ECS’ competitors believe that one is more than sufficient.

The Claymore’s I/O panel still has leftover space, causing us to question what might be missing. One thing thankfully gone is the VGA port of yore, though breaking out to one is still possible through DisplayPort. DVI is also missing, though breaking out to that is easy via HDMI. Gigabit Ethernet is limited to a single port, but we didn’t expect two at this price level. The real shocker is probably that the Z170-Claymore doesn’t have any optical S/PDIF output, not even via a combined jack, and instead relies on an internal header and a separately-purchased third-party breakout plate to fulfill the needs of those specific users. On the other hand, the lack of DTS Connect or DDL often makes 5.1 or 7.1 analog connections a preferred solution for positional audio in games.

Technical Specifications

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Layout

ECS outfits the Z170-Claymore with five PCIe x16 slots, though only the top slot has sixteen available lanes. It gives up eight of those lanes to the third slot when a card is detected there, via four two-lane switches, resulting in an x8/x8 configuration at four-slot spacing. ECS never got the Z170-Claymore certified for SLI operation, but CrossFire is supported with two cards up to 3-slots thick.

The second and fifth slots are wired to the Z170 PCH as PCIe 3.0 x4, allowing four double-slot cards to fit at proper spacing within an eight-slot case. CrossFireX is still a good option in theory, but is limited in practice by the 32Gbps link that connects Intel's LGA 1151 CPU to its Z170 PCH.

SATA and M.2 drives, USB ports, and the network controller also vie for that limited bandwidth. Even the fourth slot, which has only one lane, waits patiently for data to arrive through the DMI. More elaborate solutions, such as a 48-lane PLX bridge on the CPU’s PCIe controller, push the price of competing solutions far beyond the Z170-Claymore’s mainstream-gaming market.

ECS doesn’t list slot configuration in the Z170-Claymore’s manual or web page, but an internal document disclosed by the firm is much more revealing. As well as the above slot details, we find an M.2 connector with two dedicated SATA ports and two dedicated PCIe 3.0 pathways. Anyone disappointed by the M.2’s PCIe 3.0 x2 option should keep in mind that ECS loaded up its slots with most of the chipset’s lanes. You can, after all, add a native PCIe x4 SSD to an x16-length slot, or even use a slot adapter.

Connecting M.2 SATA comes straight from the chipset’s controller leaving only four ports for traditional SATA drives. Two of those ports are available through the SATA-E combination connector, and the other two are stacked up just above it. ECS builds the Claymore back up to six forward-facing ports by adding an ASMedia 2-port controller, though its PCIe 2.0 interface leaves the final two traditional connectors sharing a single 5Gbps pathway.

Getting back to the Z170-Claymore’s basic layout, we find power and reset buttons near the bottom-front corner, which ease testing outside the case, along with a 2-digit status code display. The front-panel USB 3.0 header is found above the uppermost expansion card along the board’s front edge to ease cable use.

ECS moved its front-panel audio header three slots up the motherboard’s back edge, as if the company was trying to get a jump on the layout of a similar Micro ATX board. This is good news for builders whose cases have shorter-than-normal front-panel cables, but bad news for builders who hate running a cable across the top of a motherboard.

The Z170-Claymore includes four SATA cables and not much else. Given its low price, most builders will probably be pleased with the installation kit.

Firmware

ECS wasn’t able to deliver the latest version of its software suite, but the motherboard web page shows that it will include eBLU (BIOS update), eDLU (driver update), eOC (basic overclocking), and eSF (fan control) software as described in our Z79-Machine review.

Z170-Claymore firmware opens to a friendly page for visually-impaired non-overclockers, with a few power profiles and a row of storage device icons that can be re-arranged to alter boot order.

Switching to advanced mode, we find the Motherboard Intelligent BIOS X menu with a group of sub-menus for CPU, DRAM, Voltage and overclocking profile storage. The latter of which helps users save settings they know work, while pursuing those that might not work.

Below these, a single “Quick OC” menu item enables an Intel Turbo Boost replicating factory-programmed overclock of 4.00 to 4.90 GHz at the board’s 1.50V CPU Core setting. Under Prime95 stress testing, this mode causes nearly-instantaneous power throttling (wattage-based clock throttling).

There aren’t many overclocks that don’t cause power-based clock throttling, as the higher voltage required to push high CPU clocks doesn’t pair nicely with an eight-thread AVX-optimized workload. Our CPU was able to reach 4.4 GHz without throttling, but only after reducing its core voltage.

The Z170-Claymore only allows manual manipulation of timings after selecting “Manual” mode, but it does retain the settings from the previous chosen mode. In other words, switching from Auto with CAS 15 to Manual allows the user to start with the original CAS 15 settings, and switching from XMP CAS 17 to Manual allows the user to start with those CAS 17 settings. Yet we were still unable to do either of these, as the board would continuously put “zeros” in several fields whenever we made the switch. Changing the “zero” values didn’t solve the problem, as hidden (inaccessible) timings were also zeroed out. It appears that this particular memory confuses this particular firmware revision, and that builders will either need to change their memory or wait for a new firmware before any of these settings work.

After nearly two days of unsuccessful attempts to make any changes to memory frequency or timings, it was time to move on.

A core voltage setting of 1.265V was the tripping point for core voltage and current overload protection, at least at clock rates beyond 4.40 GHz. Lower clocks allowed higher voltage to be used, but the point of overclocking is to reach higher clocks. Tuners who would like to try a higher clock rate in 1-2 core loads and a lower clock rate at 3-4 core loads can do so by setting the appropriate multipliers, which could help the board reach higher frequencies at lower levels of CPU stress.

How We Test

Test System Components

We’re using our standardized test system, minus its LGA 2011 motherboard, CPU, and DDR4-2400, to measure the performance of every LGA 1151 test board. Replacements for those parts include today’s Z170-Claymore motherboard, Intel’s Core i7-6700K, and G.Skill’s more-overclockable Ripjaws V DDR4-3600.

Drivers

Benchmark Suite

Test Results

Synthetics

The Z170-Claymore finished slightly down in 3DMark, but not by an amount that was noticeable in action scenes. A secondary examination with GPU-Z and CPU-Z showed that the top slot was continuously stuck in x8 mode, even though it has the required hardware to switch between x16-x0 and x8-x8 modes. The enhanced bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 should have been great enough to prevent even this small a difference, in theory.

The Z170-Claymore is in a dead heat with the top two competitors in memory bandwidth. All boards were tested using automatic settings, and the timing issues previously mentioned only occurred with “Manual” mode enabled.

Games

Perhaps it’s time for us to re-evaluate our performance expectations with PCIe 3.0 x8 mode? The Z170-Claymore falls slightly behind the pack in both Battlefield 4 and Far Cry 3, though not by a great enough margin to impact actual play.

Applications

None of the tested boards really stand out in non-gaming applications, proving mostly that they’re all pushing the same CPU speed. Had there been a large difference, we’d expect something was wrong with the winner (or loser).

Power, Heat And Efficiency

The Z170-Claymore consumes less power than its rivals at idle, which is good for efficiency and expected in a board that doesn’t have many third-party controllers tacked-on. On the other hand, it consumes far more power under load. We opened CPU-Z to see why and were startled by the report (which turned out to be wrong). ECS informed us of the problem with CPU-Z, suggested we use a different program, and said that the board was operating as intended.

That still left me scratching my head over the power reading. I got out the voltmeter and found that even though CPU-Z was up to 0.50V off at maximum (reports too high) and minimum (reports too low) loads, the actual voltage topped out around 1.50V at stock settings. That’s around 250 mV higher than other boards.

The higher voltage also affected peak CPU temperature, allowing it to reach 80 °Celsius during extended load tests. At least the motherboard’s voltage regulator stayed cool.

A performance deficit of nearly 3% in games lead to an overall 0.7% drop in the average of all tests, which combines with a 16.6% higher-than-average power requirement to force a 14.8% loss of efficiency.

Overclocking, Value And Conclusion

Just when some users thought ECS was going to pull out of the enthusiast motherboard market, the firm drops a Claymore in the mix. Those fortunately don’t explode when dropped, but could potentially blow away the competition in value.

Unfortunately, the Z170-Claymore’s power protection scheme prevented it from reaching the expected 4.6 GHz, as the voltage required to keep the CPU stable forced the frequency to go down. The chart might say 1.30V (MAX), but the board throttled the CPU when asked to provide more than 1.26V to its core (at high clocks and full load).

A firmware issue prevented memory overclocking, but that appears specific to “unfamiliar” modules. We anticipate a patch for that.

Without the ability to manually configure our memory using this version of Z170-Claymore firmware, the overclocked bandwidth chart shows a hole. Similar firmware issues kept Supermicro’s CZ170-SQ operating at the memory’s default CAS 15 in this test, and fans looking for a horn to blow should probably consider one of the two properly functioning samples as their instrument.

ECS might not have gotten its firmware right yet, but fairly solid hardware puts its Z170-Claymore in a value race against the second board in the above chart, ASRock’s Z170 Extreme6. The above chart doesn’t, however, show how much more a product with more features is actually worth.

The Z170-Claymore is certainly cheaper than the Z170 Extreme6, but is the price low enough to offset its lesser feature set? The Extreme6 does have a four-lane M.2 slot for example, but the Z170-Claymore offsets that advantage by having a second four-lane PCIe slot. And the Extreme6 has a couple extra SATA ports, but those are shared with M.2 where the Claymore’s SATA to M.2 interface is dedicated to its purpose. Both motherboards have exactly one added ASM1061 SATA controller and one added ASM1142 PCIe controller onboard.

The Extreme6 has a slightly more-popular network controller (Intel vs Realtek), an onboard optical S/PDIF output, and a DTS Connect to make that output truly useful. It also includes a dual-port USB 3.1 drive bay adapter with its own ASM1142 controller, and the latter part is probably worth the $20 price difference to those who need it. In the best case for ECS, this is probably a value tie. Buyers who can’t afford or justify the extra expense will probably want to consider the Z170-Claymore anyway.

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Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware, covering Cases, Cooling, Memory and Motherboards. Follow him on Twitter.

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Previously, a number of manufacturers announced the option to overclock K-series Haswell CPUs on non-Z series motherboards, and now Asus has joined in as well.

In the past, typically there were two requirements for overclocking CPUs with the use of a multiplier. You'd need a Z-series chipset on your motherboard as well as a K-series CPU. Now though, it appears that a bug in the 8-series chipsets allows users to overclock Intel Haswell K-series CPUs on non-Z series motherboards, allowing for overclocking on budget motherboards. A K-series CPU is still required though, as non-K series CPUs have an upwards locked frequency multiplier.

Of course, to make use of the feature you need a BIOS update, which can be found on Asus' website. Motherboards that support the feature include the H87-PRO, H87-PLUS, H87M-PRO, H87M-PLUS, H87M-E, H87I-PLUS, B85-PRO, B85-PLUS, B85M-E and B85M-G.

While it was quite a while ago that we discovered that overclocking K-series CPUs might be possible on certain H87 motherboards, it wasn't until recently that two manufacturers have officially announced the possibility.

Both ASRock and ECS have officially announced overclocking features for select H87 and B85 motherboards, while ECS also added H81 motherboards to the list.

Previously, whenever users wanted to overclock their CPUs, they would need a combination of both a K-series CPU from Intel, as well as a motherboard with a Z-series chipset. Without the two in play, overclocking through adjusting the multiplier just wasn't possible. Now though, it appears that the latter of these two requirements is no longer... required. Users will still need K-series CPUs though, as non-K series CPUs have upwards-locked frequency multipliers.

Neither ASRock nor ECS has given us a complete list of H87, B85, or H81 motherboards with support for the feature, though we do know that ASRock's Fatal1ty H87 supports the "Non-Z OC," as ECS' H87H3-M4, B85H3-M4, and H81H3-A3 motherboards support the "CPU OC" feature.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) has launched its new family of 8-series motherboards for Intel’s 4th Generation “Haswell” processors. It will be initially offered in three distinct tiers: Essentials for “home and multimedia,” Deluxe for “small office and home,” and Pro for “power computing."

The new family of motherboards will utilize ECS's new Durathon durability technology, which includes a triple density PCB, extreme temperature resistance, 1.5K point marathon testing, and “superior solid capacitors designed to greatly improve motherboard quality, stability and longevity." Also included is the company’s Hyper Alloy Choke technology, Sound Blaster Cinema, 4-way video output (DVI, HDMI, Display Port and D-Sub VGA), EZ quick charger and 4K video output.

The new chipset features support for full SATA III 6 Gb/s internal ports and PCI-Express Gen.3 x16 bus design.

ECS’s Essential, Pro and Deluxe motherboards will begin shipping in Q2 2013. The company plans to launch an additional tier for “gaming and high performance processing” following soon afterwards. The company’s “Believe to Achieve” launch trailer is available below.

ECS (Elitegroup Computer Systems) and EA (Eternal Asia) have finalized their work on two whitebox tablets that are now offered to vendors across the world. Expect these devices to become available in the U.S. in July or August.

The first tablet is the ECS Sunny Hill TM105A model, a 10-inch Android tablet based on the Z2460 Medfield processor running at 1.6 GHz. The device comes with Android 4.0.4 and a screen resolution of 1280 x 800 (5-point multi touch). The tablet aims at the mass market with 1 GB memory, 16 GB flash storage, a 2 MP rear camera and a 0.3 MP front camera. According to ECS, the 6600 mAh battery lasts up to seven hours of continuous video playback.

Those specs aren't overly impressive, but ECS is selling this tablet for $186 to Channel Partners, which should result in a $299 or $329 retail price, given that the typical retailer asks for a 25 percent cut of the retail price.

EA is offering an 11.6-inch Windows 8 tablet based on Intel's Celeron 1007u/NM70 processor with an Ivy Bridge core. While we do not know how heavy the ECS tablet is, the EA tablet weighs a hefty 950 g, which compares to 652 g for the iPad. The device delivers a somewhat underwhelming feature set with 1366 x 768 pixels screen resolution (10-point multi touch), as well as a 2 MP rear camera and a 1 MP front camera. However, it appears that the industry is now targeting at least 4 GB of system memory and 64 GB of flash storage for mass market Windows 8 tablets, which this device includes.

The channel price for the EA tablet is $353, which has a retail price of at least $599, since the $353 channel price does not even include the licensing fee for Windows 8. This may look like a good deal for a 64 GB tablet, but it is a lot of money for a mass market tablet with a screen resolution that we could describe as average at best.

Even if Windows 8 is a much better OS for tablets than it is for PCs, it will be tough for Microsoft to make a huge dent into the market if the company does not find a way to bring the Windows 8 tablet pricing down.

AMD's Answer To Ivy Bridge-Based Core i3

Once upon a time, processor reviews were simpler. Isolating x86 performance made it easy for us to draw comparisons. Today, though, we have on-board graphics, integrated memory controllers, and ISA extensions to look at. The benchmarks we run play a huge part in exposing the benefits of each piece of a modern host processor, and we're naturally very careful about testing as thoroughly as possible.

AMD's Trinity architecture received a lot of attention from us when it launched:

AMD Trinity On The Desktop: A10, A8, And A6 Get Benchmarked!
AMD Desktop Trinity Update: Now With Core i3 And A8-3870K
Gaming At 1920x1080: AMD's Trinity Takes On Intel HD Graphics
AMD's Trinity APU Efficiency: Undervolted And Overclocked

In those stories, we discovered that AMD's Piledriver-based modules are faster than their predecessors based on the Bulldozer architecture. But because AMD never released a Bulldozer-based APU, we also had to face the fact that, in some cases, older Llano-based parts were as quick or quicker. Hardly a reason to toss your old Socket FM1 motherboard and upgrade to Socket FM2, right?

Fortunately, the new APUs do manage to nudge graphics performance forward. And because AMD's on-die graphics engines are already significantly faster than Intel's best effort, the extra speed only served to hammer that point home.

And so, you're faced with an interesting conundrum. On one hand, we wouldn't mind a Trinity-based APU specifically for its 3D capabilities. On the other, we're still compelled to build with an add-in graphics card in mind. Really, then, the ideal customer for an APU is someone able to enjoy the cost savings of an A10 or A8, who won't be stymied by the chip's limitations, and who won't then go get frustrated and buy a discrete GPU. At that point, you're just watering down the platform's value and compounding its power consumption.

With that in mind, we're curious about AMD's latest driver optimizations. We also wonder if motherboard vendors have any graphics performance-optimizing tricks up their sleeves. So, rather than dropping some unrealistically-expensive discrete board into today's test beds, we're evaluating six Socket FM2-equipped platforms using an AMD A10-5800K operating all on its own.

ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6

The first thing we noticed about ASRock’s entry into our first Socket FM2 motherboard round-up wasn't the board itself, but rather its name. It follows a convention that some competing vendors make even more complex, adding socket and chipset identification to the series (Extreme6) name. We prefer nomenclature that's easy to remember, and ASRock gets us halfway there.

Opening the box, we were pleased to find ASRock's familiar Extreme6-class feature set extended to this A85X-based board, including the CLR_CMOS button and an extra pair of USB 3.0 ports added through ASMedia’s ASM1024 controller. AMD was an early proponent of DisplayPort, so we aren't surprised to find a full-sized DisplayPort output next to the platform's HDMI, VGA, and DVI connectors.

The A85X chipset originally surprised us by enabling eight SATA 6Gb/s ports, in spite of the FCH's 2 GB/s connection to the CPU. ASRock wires one of those connectors to an eSATA interface on the rear I/O panel and faces the eighth leftover connector outward, next to six forward-facing ports on the board's bottom-right edge.

ASRock also makes full use of the APU’s PCIe lanes by adding a third x16-length slot. PCIe 2.0 x16-x0-x4 lane connections automatically switch to x8-x8-x4 when a card is detected in the middle slot.

The A85X FCH’s four lanes connect two PCIe x1 slots, a gigabit Ethernet controller, and the previously-mentioned secondary USB 3.0 controller. In theory, the chipset’s UMI interface could be a pretty severe bottleneck. Fortunately, it'd be rare to see accesses to all attached devices at the same time.

Layout is good, with a few exceptions. Namely, there's a front-panel audio header on the bottom-rear corner and an ATX12V connector that’s a little too close to the CPU socket. If you own an oversized heat sink, you could have a tough time connecting or disconnecting that auxiliary power source. Moreover, if you're using an older case, you might find its built-in front-panel audio cable a little too short. Forward-facing SATA ports provide room for extra-long expansion cards, but could be blocked out by the hard drive cages of some older cases, too.

Top-side power and reset buttons, plus the two-digit diagnostics display, aid in motherboard troubleshooting. But while those features are handy for reviewers and competitive overclockers, they're typically inaccessible in a buttoned-up build.

Seven of eight SATA ports are accessible internally, yet ASRock includes only four of the seven cables. Color us satisfied, though. That's two times more cables than most folks need, giving you the flexibility to attach an SSD, two storage disks, and an optical drive right out of the box.

FM2A85X Extreme6 Firmware

ASRock dresses the FM2A85X Extreme6's firmware in stellar fashion, but doesn't allow new artwork to complicate its classic menu arrangement. Kudos for that. The OC Tweaker menu works the way we expect it to.

We chose 1.45 V for our overclocking attempts, and ASRock's Extreme6 board produced that voltage level at its 1.4375 V setting. AMD's APU was then overclockable to nearly 4.5 GHz with 100% stability.

The FM2A85X Extreme6 provides load-line calibration to stabilize CPU voltage under load, but we found it most consistent at the “0%” setting.

Since EPP is no longer mainstream, we were happy to find Intel’s competing XMP standard supported by ASRock’s AMD motherboard. XMP Profile 1 made it easier for us to nail down the highest stable DRAM frequency using our memory kit's rated timings.

XMP made things easy for us, but we still could have picked those same timings manually if we needed to. The FM2A85X Extreme6 displays XMP settings in its DRAM Timing Control menu, and provides a broad array of manual adjustments to match them.

Asus F2A85-V Pro

ASMedia’s ASM1042 controller adds an additional pair of USB 3.0 ports to the rear panel of Asus' F2A85-V Pro, while a set of PCIe 2.0 pathway switches contributes a second graphics card slot for converting x16-x0 configurations to x8-x8. Asus uses the CPU’s remaining four lanes to add a third PCI Express 2.0 slot with lower bandwidth.

Though its layout appears familiar, a closer look at the F2A85-V Pro reveals better CPU power connector and front panel audio header placement. An even closer look reveals a few tiny buttons for the Asus-exclusive features MemOK, USB BIOS Flashback, and Asus DirectKey.

MemOK automatically underclocks poorly-programmed memory to at least facilitate boot-up into the UEFI for adjustment. USB BIOS Flashback gives you the ability to update the board's firmware with no other hardware installed. Finally, Asus DirectKey allows users to enter the UEFI at any time during motherboard initialization.

Asus is particularly proud of its Fan Xpert 2 feature, which facilitates control over and monitoring of the motherboard's fan headers. Attached coolers can be set to spin up or down automatically, or configured to operate at fixed speeds.

USB BIOS Flashback is particularly useful when purchasing a newer CPU and older motherboard simultaneously, since it circumvents the issue of hardware compatibility and a firmware mismatch. Previously, that might have required you to buy an older APU just to update the board's UEFI to properly recognize the new chip. On this platform in particular, BIOS Flashback isn't as necessary, though, since Socket FM2 and Socket FM2-compatible APUs are both new. This could change in the future if AMD maintains backward-compatibility with its next-gen architecture.

The secondary function of Asus DirectKey is that of a power button. Touching the DirectKey button when the system is already up and running in an operating system triggers a shut-down, and touching it while the system is off causes it to boot directly to UEFI. That function is increasingly practical as the window for hitting the Del key to enter the UEFI gets shorter with each new motherboard generation (and even more so with Windows 8).

We’ve noticed that AMD fans are more likely to be frugal, but perhaps the time has come to quit being frugal about cases? While a good case can last through several builds, many older designs lack space to connect SATA cables to the forward-facing ports common on modern motherboards. The F2A85-V Pro can be counted among these modern designs, with six of its seven internal SATA ports facing forward to allow increased card clearence.

The F2A85-V Pro has seven internal and one external SATA connector, but users will only be able to connect half of those out of the box. The installation kit includes four internal cables, though Asus also adds a pair of its quick-connecting cable extenders.

F2A85-V Pro Firmware

Asus Ai Tweaker remains familiar, without so much as a new theme to distract us from its navigational ease.

The company's D.O.C.P. mode reads our memory kit's DDR3-2666 XMP profile and, when enabled, attempts to achieve the target data rate.

Since AMD's integrated memory controller doesn't support the proper ratio, the F2A85-V Pro multiplied its DDR3-2133 ratio by a 125 MHz reference clock. Unable to boot at this high memory speed, we tried D.O.C.P. once more after restoring the APU's stock reference clock and increasing its memory ratio to 24x. Success!

The F2A85-V Pro’s combination of hardware and firmware optimization allowed our A10-5800K CPU to crest 4.5 GHz with no noticeable loss of stability, but some extra voltage would be needed to achieve that combination of frequency and stability. The motherboard’s 1.4375 V setting gave us around 1.42 V at idle, while its 1.625 V DRAM setting gave us around 1.65 V.

Our target core voltage of 1.45 V was only really needed at full load, and that was achieved by setting the board’s CPU Load Line Calibration to High. Other combinations of higher base voltage and less load line calibration produced less-precise results.

Other Digi+ Power Control settings worked adequately at motherboard defaults.

The main reason we like XMP support is for its automatic timings configuration. The F2A85-V Pro supports those automatic timings through Asus D.O.C.P. mode. We also discovered that the motherboard compensates for higher frequency multipliers with appropriately-looser secondary timing when set to manual mode.

ECS A85F2-A Golden

At long last, ECS is acting on our complaints about confusing the various models in its line-up by putting the word "Golden" into the name of this specific board. Previous examples simply used gold packaging to indicate the difference. Online searches are text-based, though, leaving way too much room for confusion. By naming the A85F2-A Golden more descriptively, it's a piece of cake to find on sites like Newegg.

Just because this board bears ECS' flagship designation doesn't mean it includes all of the same features as past golden-class boards, unfortunately. The Port 80 diagnostics display present on ECS' higher-end Intel boards is now missing, along with the third four-lane graphics card slot offered by most competing A85X-based products. ECS does add the same secondary USB 3.0 controller as the first two competitors in today’s round-up. It also keeps the same suite of display outputs and has a similar suite of seven internal and one external SATA 6Gb/s ports as ASRock and Asus.

A handy I/O panel CLR_CMOS button and a CPU power connector that’s too close to the CPU socket are both matched by ASRock, yet the A85F2-A Golden lacks the modestly-valued internal buttons of that competitor.

It's possible that ECS decided the A85F2-A Golden’s missing features weren’t worth the cost of implementation. More than likely, nobody is going to bother installing three high-end graphics cards on AMD's value-oriented Socket FM2 platform, and the on-board power and reset buttons offered by other motherboard companies aren't worth much once you button the side of your case up. With a new understanding that ECS' Golden label is relative (and not indicative of a certain feature set), we now have to hope that the company's flagship costs less than ASRock's Extreme6 model, which comes loaded with more features.

Surprising us with seven SATA cables for seven ports, it appears that ECS knows math a little better than its competition. Most customers will only use two or three of the seven cables, but we still count the complete installation kit in considering the A85F2-A Golden’s overall worth.

A85F2-A Golden Firmware

We wanted to give every product in today’s comparison equal coverage, but that’s difficult when ECS' A85F2-A Golden only has one page of firmware settings to address the enthusiast market.

Scaling back the number of overclocking-oriented settings doesn't help ECS avoid errors, though. We found the DDR3-2400 multiplier labeled DDR3-2600. Not that we were able to utilize those higher settings; we weren’t able to get our DDR3-2666-capable kit stable, even after dropping to the board’s DDR3-2133 setting. Instead, we had to start out with DDR3-1866 and work our way up using the CPU reference clock.

Smaller issues plagued our CPU overclocking effort. The A85F2-A Golden couldn't keep our APU stable at the expected 4.5 GHz, though it was able to sustain the next step down: 4.45 GHz at 44 x 101 MHz.

The setting labeled “CPU Over-Clocking Func” was supposed to enable CPU reference clock control, but it reverted to Disabled every time we entered the UEFI.

The lowest setting we found for CPU VCore was 1.50 V, but our target was only 1.45 V. We were surprised to find that the board applied the 1.45 V we wanted to see under load by default.

We don’t want ECS to feel shortchanged by the lack of UEFI imagery, but our attempts to find another overclocking-related page in its firmware came up empty. We weren’t even able to show you the board’s list of saved configurations, because it doesn’t support those. Without the ability to apply user profiles, overclockers have start over any time their changes force them to use the A85F2-A Golden’s CLR_CMOS button.

Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4

A short and straight naming scheme makes Gigabyte’s F2A85X-UP4 easier to write about and remember, though we haven’t tested enough UP4-series products to know how their features are supposed to stack up against -UP3 or -UP5 boards. Instead, we see the similarity in features between Gigabyte’s -UP4 and ASRock’s Extreme6 platforms.

Gigabyte includes a secondary USB 3.0 controller, but uses Etron’s EJ168A rather than ASMedia's chip. It puts the F2A85X-UP4’s on-board power, reset, and CLR_CMOS switches in a group on the board’s upper-right corner. Gigabyte also moves its eight-pin auxiliary power connector away from the Socket FM2 interface. But none of those changes detract from the board’s value. In fact, we see the power connector placement as an improvement that makes larger heat sinks easier to work around.

We also find three PCIe x16-length slots that automatically switch from x16-x0-x4 to x8-x8-x4 lane configurations whenever a card is detected in the middle slot. But Gigabyte gives up the second PCI slot in favor of a third PCIe x1 slot, and that’s probably not an improvement, since the x4 slot drops to x1 mode whenever a card is dropped into the third x1 slot. AMD's chipset simply runs out of PCI Express connectivity when all of this board's slots are populated.

If you complement AMD's APU with a double-slot add-in card for Dual Graphics operation, you'll lose access to the second x1 slot. So, Gigabyte’s decision to share the third x1 slot with its x4 interface is questionable at best. We would have rather sacrificed the less-useful second slot in the interest of retaining the x4 connector's full bandwidth. 

The seventh internal SATA connector faces outward along the F2A85X-UP4’s bottom edge, which could also cause it to be blocked by a graphics card. Fortunately, it’s so far forward that most graphics cards (at least the ones you'd install on a Socket FM2 motherboard) are too short to hide it.

The F2A85X-UP4 installation kit includes a generous six SATA cables, which is only one shy of the seven ports this board boasts. The chipset's eighth SATA port is devoted to eSATA on the rear I/O panel.

F2A85X-UP4 Firmware

Gigabyte’s M.I.T. menu is familiar, relying on various sub-menus to provide comprehensive configuration settings.

The first sub-menu provides reference clock and multiplier settings. The F2A85X pushes our A10-5800K CPU to 4.5 GHz at 1.45 V.

The M.I.T. Advance Memory Settings sub-menu provides redundant DRAM multiplier control, in addition to hosting another menu for memory timings. Gigabyte matches ASRock by providing Intel XMP settings on an AMD motherboard.

Setting DRAM Timing Selectable to “Quick” allows both channel timings to be set simultaneously. Expert mode allows per-channel timings, but we’ve never found these beneficial. Primary, secondary, and memory waveform controls are selectable.

Gigabyte appears to have accepted our feedback on its inflated menu count, combining a collection of Advanced Voltage Settings that had formerly been spread across three sub-menus. Our target 1.45 V CPU core at full load was achieved by selecting a 1.425 V baseline and “Extreme” Loadline Calibration. Any combination of higher baseline and lower loadline settings produced less accurate results under full load.

MSI FM2-A85XA-G65

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a -G65 board from MSI, the most recent being a microATX model. We expect a larger board to have more slots, and AMD's newer chipset helps enable the FM2-A85XA-G65’s expanded feature set.

The A85X Fusion Controller Hub even lets MSI give up an add-in controller, since the core logic integrates four USB 3.0 ports. The chipset also integrates support for DisplayPort output, and MSI chooses to ditch eSATA in favor of more internal ports.

Sporting a pair of second-gen PCI Express x16 slots that automatically switch from x16-x0 to x8-x8 transfers whenever the second is filled, the FM2-A85XA-G65’s closest layout match in today’s comparison comes from ECS. Both boards lack a x4 slot that competing boards do offer, so we're hoping to see lower prices accompany the feature reductions of both products.

The FM2-A85XA-G65 adds a few minor features compared to its closest rival, including power, reset and CLR_CMOS buttons. MSI OC Genie is also present, alongside a handy row of voltage detection points. Those additions are most useful to reviewers and the hardcore overclockers who use open test beds on a regular basis. Because AMD's Socket AM2 platform is decidedly budget-focused, competitive overclockers probably won't be spending much time tuning APUs. These features would come in handy if MSI ever decided to to sponsor a budget-oriented overclocking event.

One minor layout issue is that the front-panel audio connector might be a little too far away from the associated jacks for the cables of certain cases to reach. That’s really a chassis problem though, and it still affects many older enclosures. As a result, you see us pointing out when a motherboard manufacturer moves this connector into a more accessible position. Forward-facing SATA ports can also be problematic for certain older cases, though most folks prefer this design for its ability to avoid conflicts with long graphics cards.

A small bag of extender leads for the FM2-A85XA-G65’s voltage detection points adds a little value to MSI's installation kit, but four SATA cables is barely adequate for this eight-port board.

FM2-A85XA-G65 Firmware

MSI continues to mix up the settings we'd rather be looking at, hiding the most important options with small fonts underneath large time and temperature readings.

The expected 4.5 GHz never materialized for this board, though a 102 MHz reference clock and 44x CPU multiplier pushed the same APU to a still-respectable 4.48 GHz.

Our target of 1.45 V for the processor was approximated at the board’s 1.45 V setting, but our memory reached its 1.65 V ceiling at the board’s 1.62 V setting. Like most of its competition in today's round-up, MSI isn't being accurate with its memory voltage. Could it be that all of these vendors are trying to unfairly secure a win in our DRAM overclocking charts? Regardless of the actual explanation we're correcting the settings of every board in today's competition to give us the proper voltage.

The FM2-A85XA-G65 provides primary and secondary memory timing control through its Advanced DRAM Configuration sub-menu. XMP modes aren’t selectable, but tuners willing to make manual adjustments will be happy to find a full timings report within its associated Memory-Z menu.

“CPU Core Vdroop Offset Control” within the FM2-A85XA-G65’s Digital Power sub-menu allows users to compensate for voltage changes due to changes in CPU load. The 60% setting kept our processor’s voltage almost perfectly stable under four threads of Prime95.

Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT

The first company to offer us a retail-ready motherboard with AMD's A85X FCH, Sapphire presents a couple unusual features on its Pure Platinum A85XT. An open-ended PCIe x4 slot is the most noteworthy change, though the fact that it's up top means you probably won't find a graphics card there. The PCIe x16 slot beneath it loses half of its connectivity to the second x16-length slot whenever a card is installed there.

The Bluetooth controller found on the Pure Platinum A85XT’s I/O panel is an unusual bonus among value-priced motherboards. Similarly unusual is the mini-PCIe x1 slot right in the middle of the Pure Platinum A85XT’s PCB, labeled for both PCIe and mSATA connectivity. One of the chipset’s eight SATA connections is tied up by the slot, reducing the number of standard SATA ports to seven.

Power, reset, and CLR_CMOS buttons along the Pure Platinum A85XT’s bottom edge aren’t unusual, nor is its Port 80 diagnostics display. On the other hand, we're far less accustomed to seeing a BIOS selector switch among those bottom-edge features. We've previously had little luck with auto-switching functionality, so we're ecstatic to find a manual switch on the Pure Platinum A85XT.

It almost appears that Sapphire designed this board to support some degree of form factor modularity. For example, a front-panel audio connector located above the second PCI Express x16 slot suggests a microATX-oriented design. As a result of its placement, you'll have to drag your audio cable up over the top of the board. Fortunately, even if your case suffers from short cable syndrome, it should still reach without a problem.

A bottom-edge USB 3.0 connector is really our only true layout concern. It’s far enough beneath the second graphics card slot to clear most GPU coolers, and far enough beneath the bottom PCI slot to clear most on-card circuits, but its distance from typical front-panel ports is a bit of a stretch for the cables included with some cases.

Anyone who’s unable to use the Pure Platinum A85XT’s front-panel USB 3.0 header with their case’s integrated ports might instead try installing the included 3.5” bay adapter. Failing that, the company also includes a slot bracket for the USB ports. Six internal SATA cables are also included in the Pure Platinum A85XT’s installation kit.

Pure Platinum A85XT Firmware

We don’t see too many motherboards from Sapphire (the company is best known for its graphics cards). So, we were pleasantly surprised at the simplicity of its Q-BIOS.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to increase the multiplier ratio to overclock our APU, nor were we able to reboot after changing the processor core and northbridge ratios simultaneously. Instead, all of our overclocking efforts were limited to the APU's stock 38x ratio, and we used nothing other than the platform’s reference clock to control frequency.

Without a way to determine our memory kit's secondary timings, we were forced to manually configure them using screenshots from another motherboard’s firmware. That’s not going to be possible for most of Sapphire’s customers.

Our CPU core operated at 1.45 V under full load with the Pure Platinum A85XT set to 1.425 V and “CPU Loadline Enabled." We only reached 4.4 GHz on a CPU known to run at 4.5 GHz, but we already know our problem was a result of multiplier control issues, rather than voltage. If you want to alter the APU's multiplier without running into the same issue we encountered, switch to software-based overclocking or wait for Sapphire to release a firmware update.

We haven’t focused much on user profiles lately, except to note when they’re missing. Sapphire doesn’t lack this feature entirely, but does limit it to a single register.

Test Settings And Benchmarks

We used the Windows 7 software configuration from our recent Bulldozer performance story for today’s benchmarks, updating only the drivers and one game. We altered our game settings by one quality level as well to help maintain more playable performance from the A10's on-die graphics engine.

Our G.Skill DDR3-2200 memory kit defaults to DDR3-1600 CAS 9. Unfortunately, both the Sapphire and ECS boards wouldn't boot with those modules installed. We were instead forced to use an older, slower DDR3-1600 CAS 9 kit for our benchmarks, which those two boards defaulted down to DDR3-1333. Manual configuration gave us the proper performance we were expecting, but you can be sure we're going to take compatibility into consideration at the end.

ECS and Sapphire didn’t have the same compatibility issues with our G.Skill DDR3-2666 kit, probably because this kit defaults to DDR3-1333 settings. Lacking SPD values for DDR3-1600, this second set of memory was reserved exclusively for our overclocking tests.

We also threw our full range of keyboards and mice at these boards to make sure that they all worked in UEFI and required no special attention in Windows. After watching every board pass that test, we tried DOS mode through a boot disk and discovered mouse issues on the Asus and ECS platforms. In DOS mode, our Logitech mouse would only move vertically, while our Razer mouse moved inconsistently, switching randomly between normal and reverse movements.

The need for DOS mode compatibility is mostly limited to old DOS mode-based games. We’re not sure how many readers are affected, but those who do should take note of the issues we're seeing, which often take firmware updates to rectify.

Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3

We use averages for performance comparisons, but our Battlefield 3 benchmarks also produce minimum and maximum FPS results. We checked through the test notes and found that all six motherboards played the game smoothly (above 20 FPS minimum) at 1600x900 and medium details, while none of them could reliably push resolution or detail levels any higher.

When considering minimum performance, the difference between the top-performing Asus board and bottom-performing Sapphire platform card drops to 1 FPS.

Pushing details and resolutions beyond playable settings only helps us to confirm that all six manufacturers are competing fairly. Large wins would indicate something wrong, and large losses would indicate configuration problems. We're happy to see none of that going on.

Benchmark Results: F1 2012

We're testing F1 2012 at medium and high details to retain consistent settings across all three benchmarks, in spite of our knowledge going in that sim games like this one are generally easier on performance than the first-person shooter we just benchmarked.

It's hardly a surprise, then, to see all six motherboards yielding playable frame rates at medium details and 1920x1080, though the minimum 37 FPS rate indicated in our test notes is nearly two times higher than we were expecting.

Frame rates once again indicate very similar performance between all six platforms. We turn to our test notes and find the lowest minimum frame rate of 22 FPS to be only 3 FPS slower than that of the top performer. They’re all playable from integrated graphics at high quality and 1080p.

Benchmark Results: Skyrim

We keep turning to our test notes to check playability, and again find that every board plays the game smoothly from the APU's Radeon HD graphics core at 1600x900 and medium quality settings. Higher settings weren't smooth on any board, so we’re left to judge each based on non-gaming criteria.

A difference of 3 FPS does look fairly large when charted on a narrow performance scale, but we’re not concerned, since none of these resolutions are playable at Skyrim’s High quality preset. These averages become additional data for each board’s overall performance index.

Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding

Who would have expected ECS and Gigabyte to battle each other for the top spot in Lame? Differences this small primarily serve to keep us awake as we wade through pages of similar benchmark numbers.

Sapphire falls one second behind in Lame and HandBrake, but catches the pack in MainConcept.

Benchmark Results: Adobe Creative Suite

Five of the six boards in today’s comparison yield identical Photoshop performance, while the sixth board falls only a second behind in this two-and-a-half minute test.

The two boards that finished at the top of our single-threaded Lame encoding results fall to the bottom of our After Effects bench.

ECS stumbles a little in the single-threaded Acrobat X test, so we retested and saw the A85F2-A Golden stumble yet again. We’re not sure the cause of that minor benchmark gap, but we do like to confirm the consistency of any atypical results.

Benchmark Results: Productivity

Gigabyte edges out the rest of the field in our 3ds Max benchmark, but ASRock catches Gigabyte in ABBYY FineReader.

Asus has a small lead in our Visual Studio 2010 compilation of Google Chrome.

Benchmark Results: File Compression

Sapphire falls behind in our 7-Zip file compression test, while ASRock and MSI surge ahead. MSI retains its lead through WinRAR, and Sapphire retains its deficit.

ASRock clips a second off the average WinZip compression time, while Sapphire adds a second.

Power, Heat, And Efficiency

ASRock's FM2A85X Extreme6 takes a fairly big lead when it comes to energy consumption under full load, but there’s a trick behind that reading: each board attempts to cram our CPU into a specific power envelope through dynamic underclocking. The other boards would eventually idle down by around 10 W, and give up around 400 MHz while doing that. ASRock’s FM2A85X Extreme6 idled down a little faster, and we weren’t able to get its “real” full-load reading.

MSI's FM2-A85XA-G65 runs the coolest during our extended full-load test, though each board throttles down AMD's APU during the run. Disabling power management features is one way to combat this behavior. However, in the real-world, you're going to want to run with them enabled to avoid wasting power. That's why we leave them enabled throughout the benchmarks.

Using an average of averages to compare performance to power consumption, we find ASRock’s 7% power savings worth an 8% efficiency increase. Noting that the board had already began to throttle back before we could get a load reading, we estimate that the FM2A85X Extreme6 would normally place around mid-pack. This is one of those rare situations where Chris’ extended power readings (total watts required to complete the entire benchmark series) would have been more-enlightening.

We don’t have to make an estimation to understand why MSI doesn't do well in terms of efficiency, since the power consumption chart shows high idle wattage.

Overclocking

Some motherboards have far broader frequency ranges than others, but a 300 MHz reference clock limit on Sapphire’s motherboard is about as realistic as a 300 MPH speedometer on a Honda Civic. PCIe and integrated GPU overclocking limits are far more restrictive.

Asus, ASRock, and Gigabyte support our 45 x 100 MHz setting, with the difference between each vendor's board attributable to reference clock rounding errors.

Gigabyte reaches the highest reference clock with its integrated GPU intact. The second-place Asus F2A85-V Pro achieves a 156 MHz base clock with full CPU stability, but reference clocks over 130 MHz destabilize the APU’s integrated Radeon HD engine. Similar problems on the PCIe bus would affect graphics cards in a similar manner.

The F2A85-V Pro take top honors in memory overclocking, allowing us to use its highest 24x memory multiplier with four DIMMs installed. ASRock doesn't support a high memory ratio, but the board is able to reach a high data rate through increases in reference clock.

Of Six Socket FM2 Boards, Two Rise To The Top

Asus provides the best overclocking on its exorbitantly-priced F2A85-V Pro, while ASRock offers the best price on its FM2A85X Extreme6, which doesn't overclock as well. Charting performance-per-dollar might it easier for some folks to choose a winner, but we also need to discuss the feature set each platform offers at its price point.

Setting a $100 baseline, the FM2A58X Extreme6 includes a x16-length PCIe x4 slot, an extra USB 3.0 controller, internal power and reset buttons, a Port 80 diagnostics display, and an I/O panel-based CLR_CMOS button. All of those features have gotten cheaper over the past few years, but that combination should still be worth at least $20 over a board that lacks them. Unfortunately, we don’t have any $80 baseline boards to compare.

Instead, we jump up $10 in price to the MSI FM2-A58XA-G65. MSI buyers gain the firm’s OC Genie button, but lose out on ASRocks’ integrated Port 80 diagnostics display. MSI buyers gain a PCI slot, but lose a PCIe x4 slot. MSI buyers gain a cooler-running voltage regulator, but lose out on ASRock’s extra pair of I/O panel-based USB 3.0 ports. These boards offer similar apparent worth, so the extra $10 hurts MSI's value proposition.

Gigabyte’s F2A85X-UP4 appears to be a higher-quality part than ASRock’s. Its feature set is nearly identical though, and that makes it hard for us to justify a $25 price premium.

The A85F2-A Golden from ECS actually loses features compared to ASRock’s model, and we can’t use its gold-plated connectors to excuse the $27 price increase.

Compared to ASRock’s sample, the Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT gains a PCI slot, moves its PCIe x4 slot to a place where it’s useful only for single-slot cards, gains an mSATA/mini-PCIe combo connector, and adds dual BIOSes with manual switching. This editor would love to give Sapphire an award based on that manual firmware selector alone, but the tiny switch and the spare ROM cannot justify the board’s $35 higher price. Even if Sapphire were to drop its price by 10%, a mere one-year warranty would continue to diminish its award worthiness.

And so, we pick up at the end of the conclusion where we left off at the beginning, trying to choose between the best-in-class Asus F2A8F-V Pro and the best-value ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6. We even have awards for the best-in-class and best-value categories. Best of Tom’s Hardware is an exclusive award, though. Nevertheless, we're happy to put both boards on even footing with Tom's Hardware Approved recognition. Between the two, the platform you choose will depend on the system you're trying to build.

Intel's Mainstream Z77 Express Goes High-End

The divide between Intel's mainstream and high-end platforms continues to confound enthusiasts. If you go with Intel's latest and greatest architecture, you're limited to four cores and 16 lanes of PCI Express 3.0 connectivity. Those specs seem pretty meager compared to Sandy Bridge-E's six cores and 40 lanes of 8 GT/s PCI Express. But, of course, Sandy Bridge-E centers on an older core design. So, in some apps, the Ivy Bridge-based Core chips are faster. In others, Sandy Bridge-E comes out ahead. How's that for a conundrum?

Gamers simply want their favorite titles to run better. And the Ivy Bridge architecture's better per-clock performance helps make that happen (not to mention dramatically lower prices). The 22 nm process Intel uses to manufacture those chips also helps cut power consumption. And while on-die HD Graphics engine is all but useless for 3D, its Quick Sync functionality facilitates great video transcoding acceleration. Ivy Bridge-based chips seem to hit similar overclocks, but with far more conservative cooling requirements. And the architecture's biggest limitation, a scarcity of PCI Express connectivity, is hardly a problem for power users building systems with one or two graphics cards.

The PCI Express on one of the boards we're reviewing today even has a repeater function that helps overcome the tiniest of Z77 Express' weaknesses in SLI or CrossFire configurations.

This platform's battle for enthusiast market share doesn’t end with basic specifications, however. Motherboard vendors must also convince their customers that Z77 Express-equipped platforms have the features and stability to match high-end X79 Express-based offerings. We received six motherboards that attempt to prove this point (though one of the products no longer qualifies for our final analysis).

The one motherboard in today’s line-up with a 48-lane PCIe 3.0 bridge is ECS’ Golden Z77H2-AX. Unfortunately, this platform climbed $40 beyond the budget limit of today’s round-up in the time we've been reviewing it. We're tired of seeing board vendors playing pricing games based on our review schedule (this isn't the first time we're seeing a curiously-timed price move). So, since we put the work in to review ECS' submission, we're including our already-gathered data and simply withholding the board from any award candidacy.

The only other $220-280 board with PLX's 48-lane PCIe swtich is also out of contention because its manufacturer chose to focus on a different high-end feature. But what other $40 feature could be worth its cost to the end user? Here's a hint: Zeus.

Three of the motherboards in today’s line-up include Thunderbolt technology, and one even has Intel’s $40 DSL3510 dual-channel controller. Choosing between its three-way SLI-capable and dual-port Thunderbolt-equipped products must have been difficult for Gigabyte, but we’re sure storage geeks like our own Andrew Ku will applaud its decision.

Panther Point's Thunderbolt Connection

Our Z77 launch article stated that the chipset's integrated USB 3.0 controller was nothing to get excited about, though it did free up a couple of the PCH’s eight PCIe 2.0 lanes. The one thing we didn’t discuss was the platform’s ability to support three graphics cards, because the block diagram shown below is actually an update from Intel.

Intel had good reason not to discuss x8/x4/x4 capability when Z77 Express launched, because it required a new CPU that would only be introduced weeks later. Instead we got a future-looking block diagram that merely hinted towards that upcoming CPU’s triple-device support.

In an almost fickle move, Intel followed its Ivy Bridge architecture launch by stepping back from its original Thunderbolt-naming block diagram to a more generic triple-card diagram. The company was thus able to make many of us forget that the PC market was getting the short end of the Thunderbolt stick until properly-equipped motherboards were ready. But, in the time between the Z77 Express and Thunderbolt debuts, board vendors decided that they really didn’t want to give up PCIe 3.0 lanes for a second-gen controller.

You see, the desktop chips Intel manufactures for its LGA 1155 interface only have sixteen PCI Express lanes (the workstation-oriented Xeons get 20, curiously enough), and that number corresponds exactly to the number of lanes monopolized by gaming graphics cards. The benchmark data tells us that eight lanes adequately feed even dual-GPU flagship boards. However, dual-card SLI and CrossFire support is a mandatory minimum feature of enthusiast-grade motherboards. If it's going to work in the same high-end configurations, Thunderbolt needs to follow an alternative path.

Even the board engineers at Intel appear to have conceded the need to prioritize PCI Express bandwidth for discrete graphics, as indicated by this snippet of its DZ77RE-75K block diagram:

On Intel's board, four of the Platform Controller Hub's measly eight PCIe 2.0 lanes go directly to its Thunderbolt controller, leaving only four lanes behind to feed its three PCIe x1 slots, two third-party SATA controllers, secondary gigabit Ethernet controller, and a PCIe to PCI hub. The math doesn’t even work out until we consider the x1 device cropped from the bottom of the above image, a PCIe to x4 hub that is forced to cram the bandwidth of all FireWire, PCI, and PCI Express-based add-in cards into a single 5 Gb/s lane. Phew!

The bandwidth squeeze might get even tighter for the dual-port Thunderbolt controller on Gigabyte’s Z77X-UP5 TH, since the high-speed component is theoretically capable of matching all of the bandwidth allowed by Intel's Direct Media Interface 2.0, which joins the Z77 Express PCH to an LGA 1155 processor. In other words, in theory, Thunderbolt devices could consume all of the chipset’s bandwidth, with not a single bit left for Ethernet, internal drives, or even a keyboard and mouse. Doh!

Granted, we think it'll be a very long time before enthusiasts buy any combination of devices that fully tax a dual-port Thunderbolt controller, but the theoretical problem still brings us back to the processor interface's biggest weakness: its scarcity of PCIe 3.0 lanes.

Like Intel, MSI’s Z77A-GD80 offers but a single Thunderbolt port. Unlike Intel, MSI doesn’t force a bunch of devices to share a single PCIe lane. MSI instead eliminates the PCIe hub, along with half of the board’s PCIe-based features. PCIe x1 slots one and three are connected to the same lanes as slots two and four, and cannot be used simultaneously. Moreover, you have to similarly choose between the board’s third-party SATA or IEEE-1394 controllers.

ASRock Z77 OC Formula

ASRock brightens the look of its Z77 OC Formula with gold-colored caps and highlights on a black PCB and matching heat sinks. An included 40 mm active cooling fan is superfluous for most applications. But at least it's thermally controlled, operating almost silently unless its automatic fan control is disabled.

Four of the six back panel-based USB 3.0 ports are fed by a third-party single-lane controller, while the other two are connected directly to the chipset. ASRock fits in four more USB ports (of the 2.0 variety) by limiting graphics output to a single HDMI connector. An I/O panel CLR_CMOS button helps overclockers get themselves out of a bind, while also giving troublemakers an opportunity to mess with you.

A pair of Marvell SATA 6Gb/s controllers add four high-speed ports to the two provided by the chipset, bringing the total number of internal drive connectors to ten (including 3 Gb/s connectivity). Port placement is simplified a bit by a front edge that extends down about an inch beyond the ATX specification, though the added width is rarely an issue for enthusiast-class cases.

Features that favor overclocking enthusiasts include an extra four-pin CPU power connector (probably superfluous), a heat pipe that runs the length of the Z77 OC Formula’s voltage regulator cooler, a Port 80-style diagnostics display, two rows of line voltage detection points, and on-board power/reset buttons. Those last three features are really only useful on an open bench.

The Z77 OC Formula’s layout is fairly convenient, with the difficult-to-place USB 3.0 header located above the board’s centerline. ASRock also put three slot spaces between it primary and secondary graphics card slots. A third double-slot graphics card would require you to mount the board in an eight-slot case. But the third slot's second-gen PCIe x4 connection makes it less than ideal in a CrossFire configuration. SLI isn't even an option, since the third slot's lanes come from the Z77 PCH, and Nvidia doesn’t allow SLI through secondary PCIe controllers.

If you own an older case, the front-panel audio connector might be a little less convenient, since its extreme bottom-rear-corner location falls around an inch beyond the reach of some front-panel cables. We haven't had this issue in the lab for a couple of years, though.

The Z77 OC Formula includes six SATA cables, ASRock’s exceptional 3.5” USB 3.0 bay adapter (able to hold an SSD), a tube of thermal paste, and an SLI bridge.

Z77 OC Formula Software

We’re trying to not redundantly cover software in this month’s round-up, but instead focus on changes. For example, ASRock’s “Formula Drive” adds an alternative GUI to its already-familiar Extreme Tuning Utility.

Overclocking still works within the limits of hardware, users can still save settings and have them applied when Windows starts up, and Intelligent Energy Saver is still just as ineffective at reducing power consumption as previously noted.

A thermal sensor map makes it easy to find anomalies; this is the one new feature we found in ASRock's "Formula Drive" software.

ASRock’s bundled RAM drive is still found within its overclocking software suite. In addition to traditional applications, such as adding swap space, the company's implementation lets users of 32-bit operating systems access memory above and beyond the 4 GB limit as if it were available drive capacity.

ASRock’s other bonus applications are also found on the Z77 OC Formula’s installation disc, including Norton Internet Security nag-ware and Smartview with its horribly-persistent Zynga links.

Z77 OC Formula Firmware

The Z77 OC Formula employs ASRock’s familiar overclocking presets. However, the firm hired a reputable overclocking guru to develop this board’s settings beyond those of previously-reviewed models. The top overclock, Stage 11, uses a 50x CPU multiplier and 1.45 V. Each step down drops around 1x from the multiplier and 0.05 V from the CPU core.

Generic overclocking profiles are designed to support a broad range of CPU samples, but some cores are inherently better than average. We were able to reach 4.70 GHz at 1.25 V, though the actual setting needed to get us that voltage was 1.240 V.

Most disconcerting was that we needed to set our DRAM to 1.61 V in order to reach its rated 1.65V setting. We’ve noticed that motherboards have been getting better at memory overclocking, and that voltage creep appears to be part of this trend. Even at the lower voltage setting, we were able to slightly exceed our memory’s DDR3-2666 rating.

A full set of primary and secondary memory timings are available for tweaking, along with clock skew controls.

The most unusual setting we found in the Z77 OC Formula UEFI was ASRock Dehumidifier. This feature simply wakes the computer from S3/S4 states periodically to warm the hardware up and prevent the collection of moisture, with user-defined waking and sleeping times.

The Z77 OC Formula provides ten storage registers for custom BIOS configurations, allowing users to experiment with various overclocking techniques and return to previous versions. Though its competitors offer similar functionality, we’ve never seen (nor needed) this many user profiles.

Asus Sabertooth Z77

Asus gives its Sabertooth Z77 the stealth treatment with a plastic cover that hides most of its on-board components. Users who don’t even want their empty slots to show will find even more covers inside the box.

The Sabertooth Z77’s I/O-panel looks surprisingly sparse in light of its specifications list, but that’s simply because Asus gets rid of large and often-unused connectors like PS/2 and DVI. We still find two eSATA connectors back there, in addition to four USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, DisplayPort, HDMI, and Asus' support-simplifying USB BIOS Flashback button.

Anyone worried about heat getting trapped under those covers can remove two sections and install a pair of bundled 40 mm fans. The coolers operate almost silently in automatic mode, though manually configuring them to spin at full speed generate moderate noise.

All eight internal SATA ports face forward, along with the internal USB 3.0 header, making room for up to three graphics card of any length. Though forward-facing ports were occasionally blocked by the lower drive cage of older cases, that problem rarely affects new builds. Asus addresses the more recent deficiency of some case designs unable to reach front-panel audio headers by moving the Sabertooth Z77’s own connector forward from its traditional bottom-rear-corner by about an inch.

The large cover blanketing Asus' board probably limited fan header placement to the motherboard’s edges. We see four connectors up top, one on the front, and two at the bottom. Two additional headers under the cover connect the optional 40 mm intake and exhaust fans.

Asus’ Sabertooth boards are designed to be shown off, but that doesn’t necessarily make them part of the company's gamer/enthusiast marketing push. None of its Sabertooth products show up on the Republic of Gamers site, and the board doesn’t have the expensive PLX switch that would have enabled three-way SLI. Instead, the top two slots share sixteen PCIe 3.0 lanes, with auto-switching setting x16/x0 and x8/x8 modes. The third slot gets a maximum of four PCIe 2.0 lanes from the PCH. Three of those lanes must be taken from the x1 slots manually, as Asus' firmware defaults the third graphics slot to x1 mode.

Because it's a two-way SLI design, Asus’ Sabertooth Z77 includes a single SLI bridge, along with four SATA cables, two optional cooling fans, and several slot covers.

Sabertooth Z77 Software

Minor cosmetic changes barely separate the Sabertooth Z77’s TurboV EVO overclocking suite from the version we detailed in July. Voltage limits are also specific to this board, and likely based on its unique hardware and firmware combination.

All of the voltage settings available in the Sabertooth Z77’s UEFI are also available in Windows via TurboV, along with most of its clock controls. We were again able to replicate our UEFI-based CPU overclock using TurboV software, though DRAM tuning still requires a trip to UEFI.

Asus’ Thermal Radar is more mature than ASRock’s competing solution, and Asus provide extra maps for fan header and voltage check locations. Thermal Radar Fan Overtime controls how long the fans spin after the system has been shut down, though we’ve never had to worry about "coked bearings" in a computer.

Asus Digi+ allows users to set a desired CPU power level via dynamic underclocking. The 45 W setting dropped our maximum CPU clock to 2.3 GHz, and the 35 W setting dropped it to 1.9 GHz. Custom configurations allow users to further tune their systems based on desired power consumption, rather than desired performance level.

Sabertooth Z77 Firmware

Asus' AI Tweaker menu hasn’t changed much in the past few years, providing both fully-manual and XMP-based manual overclocking capabilities. The difference between those two options is that XMP starts the process with higher DRAM timings, voltage levels, and data rates.

Our combination of XMP and power controls also locked out CPU ratio selection from the main menu, though synchronized ratios can still be selected from the CPU Power Control submenu.

A 1.245 V CPU core setting got us an actual 1.25 V, providing CPU overclocking stability up to 4.67 GHz.

Manufacturers have been quietly pushing higher DRAM voltage, apparently in an effort to boost DRAM overclocking, but that really wasn’t necessary for the Sabertooth Z77. A 1.625 V setting produced 1.65 V at the DIMM slot in spite of the false 1.630 V firmware reading, and the board was able to push G.Skill’s DDR3-2666 to DDR3-2800 in spite of our compensation efforts.

Primary, secondary, and tertiary timings are all accessible for memory tuning.

Depending on other settings, the CPU ratio may be accessible only from the CPU Power Management submenu. Asus also provides over-current protection adjustments here, but told us that Auto is the best choice for all but the most extreme (high-voltage) overclocks.

The Sabertooth Z77’s Ultra High Load-Line Calibration setting is supposed to reduce voltage droop by 75%, but it actually caused our voltage to go up by a few millivolts at full load. The effectiveness of each load-line level varies with changes in baseline core voltage and overclock amount.

ECS "Golden Board" Z77H2-AX

ECS' flagship Z77H2-AX is the only board in today’s comparison to include the 48-lane PCIe 3.0 bridge needed to enable three-way SLI. At the time it was delivered, it was also one of only two sub-$280 Z77 Express-based boards equipped with this extremely exclusive features.

Naming issues still plague ECS though, as each step up in model number brings with it a reduction in price and features. Heck, the firm even replaces the word Budget with Deluxe in several models, adding the word Black to the packaging of boards that aren’t part of its Black Edition high-end line. The Golden Board label still represents its top-end parts, but those words only show up on the company's box, and not in the model number.

And so, the least-impressive name denotes the firm's most expensive products, from gold-plated connector shells and pins to the previously-mentioned PCIe bridge, integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and dual eSATA ports.

ECS adds a CLR_CMOS button to the Z77H2-AX's rear I/O panel, but does not give it a second gigabit network controller. Stranger still, the company puts VGA output on a board purchased by enthusiasts who'd much rather see DVI or DisplayPort.

Note that the 48-lane PEX 8747 chip is divided up into 16 lanes on the controller side and 32 lanes on the device side. A row of four two-lane switches above the platform's second 16-lane slot allows the third 16-lane slot to borrow eight lanes whenever a card is installed there, taking the board from x16/x16/x0 to x16/x8/x8 mode. Moreover, not wasting any of the chipset’s eight PCIe 2.0 lanes on a x16 slot gives ECS the opportunity to design its Z77H2-AX without the need to switch off certain devices to enable others. We count seven slots or devices connected to the Z77 chipset's eight PCIe 2.0 lanes.

Most of ECS' boards have an empty spot where the Port 80-style diagnostics display should have gone, but the Z77H2-AX actually has the real thing for reporting system status. That’s especially handy for troubleshooting an open test bench, as are the on-board power and reset buttons, and voltage detection points along the motherboard’s top edge.

Four of the Z77H2-AX’s internal SATA connectors are rated for 6 Gb/s data rates, since two of them employ a third-party controller. One of the Z77’s missing SATA 3Gb/s ports is re-assigned to an mSATA slot, while the other remains missing in action.

The Z77H2-AX’s layout is almost as good as its features, with three spaces separating the first and second graphics card slots. But USB 3.0 header placement is the elephant in ECS' design room. Because it's so close to the third graphics slot, front-panel USB 3.0 and three-way SLI or CrossFire are mutually-exclusive features.

The Z77H2-AX includes four black and two red SATA cables, a USB 3.0-to-3.5” bay adapter, three SLI bridges, and a front-panel Wi-Fi antenna.

Z77H2-AX Software

ECS hasn’t altered its bonus software suite since our previous round-up, so we'll save you the trouble of rehashing it all here. We did, however, take another run with its unchanged eOC suite.

ECS eOC is more useful than we previously thought, even though it’s only capable of modifying BCLK and a few voltage levels.

Like many of the ECS motherboards we’ve tested in the past, this one has a bad habit of getting stuck when its BCLK is set too high in the UEFI. Several hours of effort to reset the firmware, including the use of the CLR_CMOS button, battery removal, and battery terminal shorting, could not revive the board. We even tried to force an error by starting the PC with missing components (memory, graphics, CPU), hoping that's restore the BIOS defaults. No dice.

Sometimes, an ECS motherboard that’s stuck will start working again after being disconnected for a few days. That didn’t work either, even with the battery removed. The one thing that did get the system to finally boot was when, out of desperation, we put a jumper on a pair of pins that the manual says are for chassis intrusion detection. We just happened to notice that those pins were next to the system ROM.

From that point forward, all of our attempts to push higher BCLK settings on ECS' Z77H2-AX were performed using its eOC utility. Since eOC-based BCLK modifications don't alter the firmware, choosing a bad setting in software didn’t cause the UEFI to lock up. Thus, we never had to repeat our no-boot ordeal.

Z77H2-AX Firmware

We discussed our firmware problem on the software page, if only to say that recovering from bad overclocking settings is easier to do from software. But part of the problem was that we are testing this board with old firmware.

The firmware shipping with current Z77H2-AX samples was developed way back in June. But that’s not the version we used. Our motherboard round-up invitation specifically states that, in order to keep things fair, we use the most recent firmware version published on each vendor's support page. This is to avoid special optimizations for review sites. This stuff does happen, folks. ECS didn’t publish its June firmware, though, and the only version found on its support page is from March. This is particularly problematic for an ECS board, because the company's infamous stuck-BIOS issues are often solved in its later firmware updates.

Giving ECS the opportunity to update its site after our deadline wouldn't have been fair to the vendors who submitted their products with official firmware versions right out of the gate.

A CPU Voltage setting of 1.150 V got us to a little over 1.2 V at idle, and changing the CPU Vdroop setting to Disable allowed voltage to climb to 1.25 V under load. This was the only way we could get to our target load voltage without running an excessively-high idle voltage.

In spite of our relatively low idle voltage, the board was still able to run our CPU at its 47 x 100 MHz setting. That’s not quite 4.7 GHz however, since the board’s actual base clock is 99.78 MHz.

We had to leave Intel's Turbo Boost technology enabled to reach a higher multiplier. But setting the ratio to 47x caused the CPU to jump from 1.6 GHz at idle to 4.7 GHz under load.

The Z77H2-AX doesn’t let you fine-tune memory from XMP mode, but the board retains previously-set timings when entering manual mode. Entering Manual mode from Auto mode makes SPD values your baseline, while entering Manual mode from XMP mode makes those timings stick as well. Because of that, we were able to start our DRAM overclocking effort without configuring primary, secondary, and tertiary controls by hand.

Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP5 TH

Gigabyte’s exclusive feature for today’s round-up is a dual-port Thunderbolt controller, which also supports two monitors as long as the DVI-D connector is empty. Of course, it also supports two chains of storage devices or whatever else affluent enthusiasts connect to the PCI Express-based external interface. Anyone who would rather hold off on $40 cables might be just as happy with the Z77X-UP5 TH’s selection of four back-panel USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, DVI, and VGA outputs.

We’re still trying to wrap our heads around the presence of VGA output on high-end boards. It's a little easier to explain the lack of two gigabit Ethernet controllers by the fact that Intel's Thunderbolt controller eats half of the Z77 Platform Controller Hub's PCIe 2.0 lanes. In the face of a lot less PCI Express connectivity, Gigabyte's engineers were forced to put all three PCIe x1 slots on a four-lane PLX bridge.

Gigabyte certainly didn’t want to give up any bandwidth for discrete graphics cards, though we probably would have tolerated an 8732 bridge in exchange for more PCIe performance elsewhere. As it is, anyone who wants to populate the bottom x16 slot will find that doing so knocks the board into x8/x4/x4 mode. Don't even bother if you're trying to upgrade a machine with a Sandy Bridge-based CPU; you need an Ivy Bridge-based chip to support that kind of lane division.

With those limitations in mind, PLX Technology's 8732 PCI Express switch looks like it would have been a better move for Gigabyte. And using it would have given the company's designers a lot more flexibility in choosing PCIe x1-based features.

The Z77X-UP5 TH’s layout is good overall, with one of its two USB 3.0 internal headers found above the top graphics card slot where it won’t block anything. The top and middle PCIe x16 slots are also separated by three spaces to assist GPU cooling, and the Port 80 diagnostics display is located by the memory slots where it can’t get blocked by a processor or graphics card heat sink.

On the other hand, the second USB 3.0 internal header is found below the bottom graphics slot, and using it would prevent the insertion of most performance-oriented graphics cards. A SATA 6Gb/s connector placed along the bottom edge seems even more wasteful in light of the fact that mSATA is shared with one of the more conveniently-located forward-facing ports.

Most builders don’t use the top PCIe x1 slot, but Gigabyte gives them a good reason to with its Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card. The Wi-Fi side is PCIe, while the Bluetooth radio unfortunately requires connecting an internal cable to one of the Z77X-UP5 TH’s front-panel USB 2.0 headers.

The Z77X-UP5 TH includes a very nice-looking USB 3.0-to-3.5” external bay adapter, six SATA cables, the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card with dual antennas, a USB 2.0 link cable for the Bluetooth controller, and a single Nvidia SLI bridge.

GA-Z77X-UP5 TH Software

Gigabyte’s software package has changed little since our most recent round-up. Those changes that were made focus on the use of Realtek's hardware, rather than VIA's, for audio functionality. The ALC898 is supported by Creative’s X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity software.

Gigabyte’s Auto Green utility allows users to awaken their PC whenever a Bluetooth device is within range of its sensor.

Gigabyte EasyTune 6 also remains unchanged, with Quick Boost Level 3 pushing 4.68 GHz at a reasonable 1.30 V CPU core.

GA-Z77X-UP5 TH Firmware

A few easy settings help the Z77X-UP5 TH push a stable 4.69 GHz from our Ivy Bridge-based CPU. We got there using a 102 MHz base clock, 46x multiplier, and a 1.25 V target core voltage.

The Z77X-UP5 TH gets close to achieving DDR3-2800 data rates with our G.Skill DDR3-2666 samples. Choosing Quick tuning let you configure both channels simultaneously, while Expert mode allows per-channel settings.

Primary, secondary, and tertiary timings are adjustable, and individual settings can be left to the motherboard’s Auto adjustment. Changing the memory multiplier allows the board to deviate from SPD or XMP values, so we locked-in our memory’s 11-13-13-35 rating during our overclocking tests.

Keeping our CPU close to its 1.25 V target under both light and heavy loads required us to set Vcore Loadline Calibration to Turbo with a 1.24 V baseline CPU core. The memory similarly required a 1.625 V setting to produce a meter-checked 1.65 V at the DIMM slots.

Intel DZ77RE-75K

Intel sent two versions of its high-end Z77 Express-based motherboard, with and without Thunderbolt technology. Unfortunately, we were only giving each vendor one slot each in today's story. After looking at the features its competitors offered, we decided to go with the Thunderbolt-equipped version.

In addition to a single Thunderbolt port, the rear I/O panel offers four USB 3.0, four USB 2.0, and FireWire ports, along with HDMI output and two interfaces to gigabit Ethernet controllers. On the other hand, all three of this board's x1 slots, both of its PCI slots, and its FireWire controller fight for the bandwidth of a single PCIe lane through a single-lane to multi-lane switch.

If overclocking causes the system to stop booting, pressing the Back to BIOS button will force the board to start up with factory settings without losing your custom configuration. The motherboard simply ignores the custom settings until the button is disengaged, allowing users to make minor corrections before trying again.

The reason that so many devices share so little bandwidth is that Intel dedicates most of the Z77 PCH's connectivity to its Thunderbolt controller. And, like Gigabyte, it reserves the CPU's PCI Express lanes for discrete graphics. You don't get a triple-card option. Instead, the x16/x0 lane configuration changes to x8/x8 when an add-in board drops into the second PCIe x16 slot.

Because the bottom PCI Express slot doesn't support a graphics card, we're less bothered by Intel's placement of the USB 3.0 header. On the board's bottom edge, both headers are horribly located. But most PCIe x1 cards are thin enough to prevent spatial conflicts.

Intel moves the DZ77RE-75K's front-panel audio connector up the board’s rear edge by three slot spaces, making it easier for short cables to reach, while simultaneously making finished builds look more cluttered (there’s no way to get the cable to the header without running it over the motherboard’s top).

Two Marvell SATA 6Gb/s controllers add one external and two internal ports to the six controlled by the chipset. All eight of the board’s internal SATA ports face forward to avoid conflicts with long cards, though some older case designs block access to forward-facing ports. Reading chassis reviews help avoid those kinds of problems, though.

A Port 80 diagnostics display and internal power/reset buttons help overclockers bench-test the DZ77RE-75K, but those features are far less valuable once you get the board installed inside an enclosure.

The DZ77RE-75K includes a mouse pad, four SATA cables, a USB 3.0-to-3.5” external bay adapter, an SLI bridge, and a USB 2.0-based Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module. The module is designed to adhere to the back of a solid plastic 5.25” bay cover.

DZ77RE-75K Software And Firmware

Intel’s software bundle is unchanged from our previous review, and even its hard-to-find Extreme Tuning Utility remains without update. We took a few screenshots to be certain, but, with nothing new to discuss, we can instead refer you to our last round-up for more information about Intel's bundled software.

The DZ77RE-75K’s firmware-based overclocking menu also appears unchanged from less expensive board we reviewed previously, though a change in hardware does trigger different overclocking results. A 101 MHz base clock and 46x multiplier give us 4.64 GHz at 1.25 V.

It appears that everyone is fudging the numbers when it comes to voltage these days, displaying lower voltages in the firmware than our meters show at the pins, and Intel's DZ77RE-75K sets a particularly egregious example for the CPU core. To begin with, High V-droop mode is supposed to allow voltage to sag under CPU load, but this board caused the CPU’s voltage to climb under load. Setting Low V-droop caused the CPU voltage to climb even more under load. The only way we could get the CPU to 1.25 V was to choose 1.19 V as the baseline and watch the voltage climb.

The DZ77RE-75K doesn’t let you fine-tune memory from XMP mode, but the board does retain previously-set timings when entering manual mode. Entering Manual mode from Auto makes SPD values your baseline, while entering Manual from XMP mode makes those timings stick as well. Because of that, we were able to start our DRAM overclocking effort without manually configuring primary, secondary, and tertiary controls.

The big difference between memory overclocking on the Intel and ECS boards was the set voltage. While ECS reported 1.632 V for our 1.65 V reading, we had to set the DZ77RE-75K to 1.687 V to reach an actual 1.65 V on our meter. That makes Intel the only company in today’s comparison that isn’t under-reporting DIMM voltage.

MSI Z77A-GD80

With a single Thunderbolt port and no PCIe bridge to facilitate lane sharing, the best way for MSI to beat Intel is on price. It’s no wonder, then, that the Z77A-GD80 is $35 cheaper than Intel's DZ77RE-75K.

Anyone interested in the Z77A-GD80 gets two fewer back-panel USB 3.0 ports, but more audio connectivity compared to MSI’s most closely-matched rival, Intel. We also find a third PCIe graphics slot, which could be the deciding factor for many buyers.

A quick look at the PCIe switches tells us that the Z77A-GD80 goes from x16/x0/x0 mode to x8/x8/x0 when a card is installed in the second x16-length slot, and then to x8/x4/x4 mode when a third graphics card is added. A quick check of the motherboard manual confirms our observation. Though this is the only way to natively support three graphics cards from the Ivy Bridge processor’s on-die PCI Express controller, the same configuration is not available if you have a Sandy Bridge-based processor installed. The newer CPU supports three devices, while the older CPU supported only two.

MSI uses a forward-facing USB 3.0 internal header to fit that big and inflexible cable underneath any long expansion cards. Most cases that support forward-facing SATA cables will have no problem with the forward-facing USB 3.0 ports.

The Z77A-GD80 also includes two added-in SATA 6Gb/s ports via a third-party PCIe-based controller. That controller sits on the same PCIe 2.0 lane as FireWire, however, and you have to pick the device you want enabled through MSI's firmware.

You're faced with the same conundrum if you have multiple PCI Express x1 cards, since the four slots sit on only two lanes. Choosing between slots one and two should be easy since the second x1 slot is usually blocked by the graphics card anyway, and an SLI configuration would make the same choice between x1 slots three and four just as easy. MSI could have simply left out x1 slots two and four to save a few cents, except that enthusiasts are more likely to notice blank spaces on the motherboard before they realize two of those slots won't work at any given time, disingenuous as that may be.

Overclocking exhibitionists will like the Z77A-GD80’s on-board Port 80 diagnostics display, enough though its location could be covered by a second graphics card. A row of voltage detection points, power, and reset buttons are similarly valuable, and fortunately less likely to get covered up.

The Z77A-GD80 includes four SATA cables, a set of voltage check-point adapter wires, a USB 3.0 slot panel adapter, and a single SLI bridge.

Z77A-GD80 Software

As with today’s other samples, we spent around an hour with MSI’s various software applications to see what’s new compared to our previous review, and found only a few changes.

Though the board still includes THX TruStudio Pro, we wanted to see what Realtek’s control panel looked like before installing that software. We found a variety of synthesized environments and a manually-adjustable equalizer with its own group of presets.

The multiplier and voltage settings for MSI Control Center work on this motherboard, but DRAM timings do not. We were able to set our CPU to 46 x 100 MHz and 1.25 V, but any memory adjustments caused the program to crash. More details about the program that aren’t specific to this motherboard can be found in the program’s original review.

Z77A-GD80 Firmware

Our Z77A-GD80 overclocking efforts were a little more successful in firmware than in software, reaching 4.7 GHz CPU and a hair more than DDR3-2800 at 1.25 V core and 1.65 V memory.

The actual CPU core and DRAM voltage settings needed to reach those targets were 1.235 V and 1.633 V. We also had to set Vdroop Offset Control to 100% to keep the CPU voltage from sagging below 1.25 V under load.

XMP profiles got our memory overclocking started, but the Z77A-GD80 loosened the timings from 11-13-13-35 to 11-14-14-37 when we picked the higher 28x multiplier. Fortunately, we were able to set just those few timings back to XMP defaults without reconfiguring secondary and tertiary controls.

Test Settings And Compatibility

While G.Skill’s F3-17600CL9Q-16GBXLD provides the default DDR3-1600 CAS 9 settings we want for benchmarks, it’s no longer fast enough to push the limits of today’s best memory controllers. The firm provided a set of its F3-2666C11Q-16GTXD Trident X DDR3-2666 specifically to extend our overclocking capabilities.

We’re watching the gradual resolution of all of our previous peripheral woes as manufacturers continue to move their UEFI developments forward. Keyboards and mice from Microsoft and Logitech, plus a Saitek keyboard and Razer mouse, were all compatible with every board in both Windows and UEFI modes.

The question lingers about whether our previous purchase of these components was a waste of money. Some companies wait until a problem is exposed before they fix it, and this is especially true of minor issues such as UEFI mouse compatibility.

When testing products from different vendors based on dissimilar technologies, a real-world benchmark set helps us determine real-world performance differences. Yet, today’s boards center on the same chipset, and synthetics are more useful for finding the cause of performance deficits. Performance parity between all properly-designed Z77 motherboards has forced us to look for problems rather than solutions.

Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11

Ideal test results would show no performance differences between motherboards that have identical chipsets, yet small differences in clock rate and default memory timings affect that concept. We’ll instead focus on big leads (cheating) or big deficits (configuration problems).

ASRock takes a big lead in 3DMark’s Overall and Graphics subtests, but is the company cheating? We double-checked the clock speed and didn’t find anything suspect, but we’ll also check memory performance on the next page. A small BCLK deficit puts ECS slightly behind the pack.

Benchmark Results: PCMark And SiSoftware Sandra

The competition gets far tighter in PCMark, reflecting the minimal performance differences we should expect when nobody cheats and nothing is broken.

What’s wrong with Asus' motherboard in Sandra Arithmetic? Several retests did not reveal a problem, just consistent results.

Asus' performance deficit in Sandra Arithmetic doesn’t show up in Sandra Multimedia. These two metrics test different parts of the CPU, so we still can’t rule out an errant firmware setting.

ECS runs the same DDR3-1600 default multiplier and same CAS 9 default timings as everyone else. The board’s memory bandwidth is down a notch, but not by enough to indicate broken dual-channel mode or a faulty frequency.

Memory timings naturally have an impact on Sandra's Memory Bandwidth module, so we’re not surprised to see ECS falling trivially behind the pack in its latency bench. A combination of slightly worse secondary timings and a slightly lower-than-standard base clock could explain the Z77H2-AX’s loss in Sandra Bandwidth. Differences this small show up on charts, but go unnoticed in daily use.

Power And Heat

MSI registers the lowest power consumption, which typically indicates that all of Intel’s power-savings features are enabled, that few third-party controllers are active during the test, and that power control circuitry is fully optimized.

Gigabyte, Intel, and Asus are close enough to MSI that all three appear optimized, while ECS' Z77H2-AX looks like it could use a little more development. ECS also has the oldest firmware, and that could help explain its higher power consumption.

Asus and ASRock enjoy the benefit of fans, yet they also have the highest voltage regulator temperatures. Intel, MSI, and Gigabyte all look cool using nothing more than waste air from the CPU cooler to carry away the heat.

Overclocking

Only two companies, MSI and ASRock, manage to break our CPU past 4.70 GHz at 1.25 V core. Gigabyte, ECS, and Asus are marginally behind in CPU overclocking, while Intel’s DZ77RE-75K trails noticeably.

Gigabyte’s Z77X-UP5 TH is the only board in this batch to reach a 111 MHz BCLK. This enhanced capability is usually only desired when overclocking locked processors.

Increasing the Z77H2-AX's base clock through the UEFI lead to what seemed like endless hours of POST failures, so we recommend users not even attempt that with ECS' board.

Asus has historically produced the best memory stability, and its Sabertooth Z77 tops the charts on average. MSI edges out Asus when only two modules are installed, while ASRock edges out MSI when four are needed.

Picking The Right High-End Z77 Board

Today’s motherboard comparison has two distinct groups of platforms: those with and those without Thunderbolt technology. Of the boards without Thunderbolt, ECS had the best features.

Unfortunately, ECS' Z77H2-AX falls completely outside of today’s budget range. The company simply wasn’t able to maintain its temporarily-deflated price until after our review got published. Asus and ASRock are our remaining non-Thunderbolt choices, and both are fairly well matched for features and stability, yet Asus's five year warranty trumps the three years of ASRock.

All of the Thundebolt boards are heavily compromised due to the scarcity of PCIe lanes inherent to Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture. The worst-compromised board lacks the PCIe switch needed to activate all of its interfaces at once, but comes in cheaper than even the non-Thunderbolt-equipped boards. If your needs are almost completely addressed by Intel's Ivy Bridge processor design, third-gen PCIe x16 graphics, and a single Thunderbolt port, MSI’s Z77A-GD80 looks like a good value.

Gigabyte beats Intel in Thunderbolt support by offering two connectors, but lacks Intel’s secondary gigabit Ethernet controller. The Z77X-UP5 TH is also $30 cheaper than the DZ77RE-75K, and few of use would pay $30 for the extra network controller. Both boards also include Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo modules. From a pure value perspective that doesn’t account for any specific user’s specific needs, Gigabyte’s dual-Thunderbolt-equipped Z77X-UP5 TH appears to offer more features per dollar.

In fact, the difference in price between Gigabyte and MSI solutions is only $5, and Gigabyte’s solution also includes the PCIe switch needed to activate all of its features simultaneously. That switch is worth more than the $5 price difference. MSI also lacks any Wi-Fi or Bluetooth capabilities, which we think are worth about four times the price difference. Add in the fact that the Z77X-UP5 TH has twice as many Thunderbolt connectors, and Gigabyte takes the value lead away from MSI in spite of the $5 price difference.

While Asus relied on an extended warranty to put its Sabertooth Z77's ahead of ASRock's Z77 OC Formula in value, hardware differences made it easier to pick a leader between various Thunderbolt solutions. Gigabyte leads that features-per-price battle without making any serious concessions in performance or overclocking, so the Z77X-UP5 TH earns its value award.

Our attempt to work out the value award mathematically assumes that Thunderbolt technology is worth as much as it costs, something that should be a safe assumption for anyone who thinks they might use this new technology within the next few years. But anyone who doesn't use that technology during the life of their next build will find no value in it, and anyone who's prone to motherboard failure will find exceptional value in Asus' extended warranty. Because both of these exceptions will likely apply to a large number of buyers, the Sabertooth Z77 also gets our stamp of approval.

Seven Affordable Z77 Express-Based Motherboards Get Dissected

Everyone loves a fast machine, but buying the best of the best is an expensive habit. Thank goodness for Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture then, right? You don't need to sink a ton of cash into a Sandy Bridge-E-based processor and the expensive motherboards they require. Instead, a third-gen Core chip and a Z77-based platform should do the trick nicely.

Alright, so you do lose some functionality. Sandy Bridge-E features 40 lanes of on-die PCI Express, after all. The Ivy Bridge/Z77 combination slims that number down to 16 lanes and a "modest" two-channel memory controller. But the features it does facilitate are good enough for a majority of our readers looking for a smart play that's fast, energy-efficient, and affordable.

As a bonus, in addition to more attractive pricing than LGA 2011, Ivy Bridge-based chips include Intel's second-generation Quick Sync technology. Sandy Bridge-E doesn't enjoy any form of fixed-function transcoding acceleration. Of course, Quick Sync is a component of the architecture's integrated graphics engine, and most enthusiasts won't want to bother with HD Graphics 4000. Fortunately, Lucidlogix's Virtu software makes it easy to use discrete graphics for gaming and Intel's built-in stuff for your video work.

But you've heard all of that before, we're sure. Rather than blathering on about Ivy Bridge and Intel's most modern desktop chipset, let's instead introduce the cheaper-than-$160 motherboards we'll be reviewing today. They're what make fast, inexpensive, enthusiast-oriented machines a reality. And by the time you get to the end of today's incredibly information-packed story, you'll know which of these platforms are our favorites.

Thanks to the efforts (and unified voice) of our readers, all seven of the motherboard vendors participating in today's story are now on equal footing when it comes to the length of their warranties, each offering three years of protection. There's more to each of these boards than its specification sheet, though, so we’re diving into the features, firmware, and software package included with them all.

ASRock Z77 Extreme4

ASRock takes its recent ambitions to rule the overclocking world seriously in its Z77 Extreme4, putting much of its design effort into the CPU’s voltage regulator. We still find the expected budget-oriented enthusiast feature set, though, and the board’s mid-range price creates enough headroom for ASRock to add extra USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s connectivity to the mix.

The extra USB 3.0 controller accounts for the I/O panel’s two additional ports, and there's one more SATA 6Gb/s port on the rear I/O panel, too. Where's the second port you'd expect to find corresponding to a discrete dual-port controller? It's inside, next to all of the discrete SATA connectivity. In fact, there are actually two ports in addition to Intel's native six, which means that one of those internal ports is shared with the eSATA connector. If you want to hook up external storage, you'll need to leave one of those value-added internal SATA ports open.

In keeping with its overclocking theme, the Z77 Extreme4 retains the rear-panel-based CLR_CMOS button normally found on higher-end products, along with the internal on-board power and reset buttons that make bench testing easier.

A Port 80 diagnostics display aids overclockers by letting them know what part of the boot sequence is responsible, should the system hang.  Above it, a replaceable CMOS IC allows the ROM to be swapped out if its programming is ever completely ruined.

The Z77 Extreme4 sends sixteen PCIe 3.0 lanes to the first x16 slot, while a set of switches allow eight of those lanes to be sent to the second x16-length slot whenever a card is installed there. The second slot is far enough from the bottom edge of the motherboard to prevent most graphics cards from blocking the view of its Port 80 display, and forward-facing SATA ports allow cables to fit under the ends of extra-long cards. Forward-facing ports sometimes conflict with the drive cages of certain cases, but this 8.5”-wide board is narrow enough that you shouldn't encounter an issue, even in the tightest of full-ATX enclosures.

The USB 3.0 header is similarly tucked into a conflict-free zone, right next to the main ATX connector and a hair above the centerline of the top PCIe x1 slot. In fact, front-panel audio is the only header that might cause a problem with any of our builds, since several cases have been manufactured with a cable that’s approximately one-inch too short to reach it. Really, the case vendors are to blame for this, though motherboard manufacturers need to work around it.

While the Z77 Extreme4 should install easily into any of our ATX enclosures, the upward-facing ATX12V latch might make removing the platform a little more difficult. That’s because many cases are designed with an access hole right above this connector to route the cable behind the motherboard tray. Doing so loops the cable over the top of the latch, though. As you might imagine, we've run into problems like that before.

Two SATA cables and an SLI bridge are what come bundled. Anyone who expects more from an ASRock installation kit needs only to look at the Z77 Extreme4’s modest price to see why the firm felt this might be a suitable limitation.

Z77 Extreme4 Applications

ASRock’s current installation CDs include an “Install All” option that, fortunately, can be modified after opening the company's setup routine. Several of the applications are simply annoying, while others may be unnecessary to most users.

Most obnoxious of all is SmartView, which begs users to start its trial period every time you launch your browser.

Norton Internet Security trial alerts are made a little less annoying by the knowledge that some users might actually need a temporary A/V solution. A gadget was also present, though easy to ignore.

Even less bothersome (and perhaps even useful to some folks) is the inclusion of THX TruStudio Crystalizer. Added to entice users into purchasing Creative’s $25 TruStudio Pro upgrade, this free version adds dynamic range to digital music (louder louds and quieter quiets), helping address the limitations imposed during analog-to-digital conversion.

Simultaneously annoying and useful, ASRock’s XFast USB software prompts users to remove and reconnect any previously-undetected USB storage device before attempting and often achieving in its effort to improve transfer performance.

Potentially more useful is ASRock’s XFast LAN application, which lets you specify network packet priority, among other things.

ASRock also includes Intel’s Smart Connect software, which can wake a system occasionally to download updates from apps like Twitter and Facebook. This feature actually alleviates the annoyance of waiting for a bunch new messages to stream in when you first sit down at your PC.

Other applications include ASRock’s Instant Boot hibernation utility, a trial copy CyberLink MediaEspresso for use with the included Virtu MVP software, and ASRock 3 TB+ Unlocker to enable large drive access within 32-bit operating systems.

Overclocking With ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility

We can’t forget ASRock’s overclocking and hardware monitoring utility, which allows users unfamiliar with or scared of UEFI changes to attempt an overclock within Windows. More hardware overclockers occasionally use the same type of software to make minor adjustments beyond what they’ve already set in a board's UEFI.

ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility opens to its hardware monitoring page, showing most of the voltage, fan, and temperature readings also found in the UEFI, without needing to exit Windows.

AXTU provides temperature-based fan control only for the CPU fans and one chassis fan header. Manual adjustment is available for the two CPU and three chassis fan headers, and our tests demonstrate that feature to work as advertised.

We slid the clock and voltage controls all the way up under AXTU’s Overclocking tab to show how far these scale. Although we didn't apply those extreme settings to our delicate hardware, we did find smaller changes in BCLK, CPU ratio, and CPU voltage reflected in CPU-Z.

UEFI overclocking profiles are repeated into AXTU’s OC DNA menu.

ASRock Inteligent Energy Saver gets a tab, but we didn’t find settings beyond On and Off.

XFast RAM is ASRock’s RAM drive utitility. RAM disks provide a super-fast place to temporarily store files while working with them, such as large images that are being manipulated in Photoshop. The capacity of any RAM-based drive is subtracted from total available system memory. ASRock points out that putting temporary files on the RAM drive minimizes strain on SSDs, and the firm even has a video that shows XFast RAM using unavailable memory (installed memory beyond the 4 GB limit) within a 32-bit operating system.

Z77 Extreme4 UEFI

A particularly useful feature within the Z77 Extreme4 UEFI’s Main tab, “System Browser” illustrates the position of attached hardware, rather than trying to break it all down in a simple list, as we've seen other vendors attempt. If a part isn’t detected in Windows, a quick trip to the UEFI can show whether it’s an actual interface problem.

Our primary UEFI focus remains on overclocking-oriented features, and the Z77 Extreme4 provides a laudable array compared to the competing models in this price range. ASRock begins by enabling newbie modes like Advanced Turbo 30 (a 30% overclock), built-in overclocking profiles ranging from 4.0 to 4.8 GHz, and several integrated GPU performance-boosting profiles.

Though processor cores can be configured all at the same time, the only way we found to disable Intel's Turbo Boost technology was to first set the CPU Ratio setting to “Per Core.” This actually keeps Turbo Boost enabled, but disables the processor’s ability to self-adjust each configuration under normal operation. Thermal and power overrides still apply.

Following several complaints by multiple readers and one manufacturer, we decided to scale back our processor’s overclocking voltage to 1.25 V. This gets us within 2.5% of our previous super-high overclocks, while reducing maximum power consumption by around 25%. Setting 1.24 V CPU and Level 1 Load-Line Calibration in ASRock's UEFI got us very close to our 1.25 V full-load goal, and the Z77 Extreme4 approaches 4.7 GHz at 46 x 102 MHz using these settings.

Scrolling all the way to the bottom of the Z77 Extreme4’s OC Tweaker menu, we find three user-definable overclocking profile registers.

The DRAM Configuration submenu provides a full set of primary and secondary timings.

Asus P8Z77-V LX

For about $5 less than ASRock’s competing model, the P8Z77-V LX gives users access to Asus' legendary support structure, including frequent firmware updates long after a product has left production. You'll need to give up a few luxuries to get that lower price, however. You can start with the board's rear panel, which hosts only two USB 3.0 ports and three 1/8" analog audio jacks.

Budget builds are often stuck with old analog speaker system, and three jacks are still enough for 5.1-channel surround sound. While Asus relies on its front-panel header to support an eight-channel output claim, most users use those two additional channels to plug in a headset.

Also missing are any PCIe 3.0 pathway switches, which would have made x8/x8 mode possible for the P8Z77-V LX’s two x16-length slots. Instead, users get one slot locked into 16-lane transfers and a second locked into four-lane PCIe 2.0 transfers through the Z77 PCH. That limitation still allows for CrossFire configurations, but crosses SLI off the feature list, unless you get your hands on a single-card, dual GPU solution. Fans of Nvidia's multi-card rendering technology might want to consider the better-equipped P8Z77-V LK, though that model was priced above our $160 cut-off when review invitations went out.

Asus also omits on-board power and reset buttons, which other vendors use to woo bench testers without adding any real value to the average enthusiast. After all, those buttons become redundant once a motherboard is mounted into a case with its own externally-accessible buttons. This reviewer does miss the Port 80 diagnostics display that Asus fails to include, however. Asus believes its less informative pass/fail LEDs are easier to read.

Asus' MemOK and GPU Boost features are engaged using two switches along the P8Z77-V LX’s front edge that some builders will find useful. MemOK temporarily underclocks poorly-programmed memory to get you into the UEFI, where problematic modules can be configured manually. GPU Boost goes the other direction, overclocking the HD Graphics engines built into Intel’s LGA 1155-based processors.

We always look for layout problems that could hinder a build, and the worst thing we could find on Asus' P8Z77-V LX was that none of the fan connectors were located within easy reach of a case’s front panel. This complaint is trivial, since so many cases come with four-pin Molex power connectors. Asus even moves the P8Z77-V LX’s front-panel audio connector forward about an inch from the corner in which we usually find it, heading off any complaints we might have lodged about short cables. Bravo!

Two SATA cables are enough to complete the simplest builds. The P8Z77-V LX doesn’t include an SLI bridge because the board doesn’t have the hardware required to support two cards rendering cooperatively in SLI.

P8Z77-V LX Applications

The P8Z77-V LX includes several freeware and trial software applications, in addition to those written by or for Asus. Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Adobe Reader X, and a 60-day trial for Norton Internet Security are among them. They're all installed by default using Asus' “InstAll” method. Fortunately, that option can be deselected from the driver package’s “InstAll” menu, since you'd otherwise be plagued by Norton's pesky register/upgrade reminder.

Asus includes a USB Turbo Mode application. Unlike its competitors, however, the company uniquely supports UASP. Our recent investigation into this technology shows that certain USB 3.0-based devices already support USB Attached SCSI Protocol. But Asus thus far maintains exclusivity on the host side.

Asus still calls its vastly-updated monitoring utility PC Probe II, though today’s version is much more versatile and accurate than early versions of the software. We find voltage, temperature, and fan speed measurements, though several less significant voltage readings (such as CSA and DIMM) are still missing.

Fans of Asus' monitoring software should make sure they want to keep it before making the decision to install, as our copy would not uninstall cleanly. The pieces left behind caused no problem with a motherboard we tried to install later on using the same drive, but they did sabotage a competing vendor's monitoring software.

Going beyond live reporting, Asus Sensor Recorder provides a chart of the values seen in PC Probe II over time.

Asus Fan Expert allows users to modify the P8Z77-V LX’s automatic fan profiles for all three of the board’s four-pin headers.

Asus' EPU utility provides several automatic power-saving profiles, two of which can be reconfigured by users. We found a maximum savings of approximately 2 W at idle, compared to CPU- and operating system-based settings.

The P8Z77-V LX also includes Asus Network iControl, with which you can optimize packet prioritization to favor, for example, latency-sensitive online gaming.

Some people back things up to their 2 GB-or-larger email accounts, but downloading that saved content isn’t always convenient. Asus provides 2 GB of Web-based storage for free. You can get up to 10 GB of capacity by referring others or 1 GB by subscribing to another Asus service. The WebStorage program is used to sync and backup whatever folders you wish.

Overclocking With Asus TurboV

In addition to its manual overclocking options, Asus TurboV offers less-knowledgeable users a chance to capitalize on the P8Z77-V LX’s impressive overclocking capabilities through an auto-adjustment utility. The program achieved a stable 4.22 GHz at 1.216 V using its “Fast” overclocking scheme, and 4.84 GHz at 1.456 V after choosing its “Extreme” alternative.

The biggest problem with the Extreme profile is that it applied far too much voltage for our Ivy-Bridge based CPU. These cores are notorious for an interface problem that prevents even the best coolers from achieving useful temperatures at moderate voltage levels, and 1.456 V far exceeds the 1.30 V we feel comfortable recommending as a safe limit for reasonable longevity. With only a little trepidation about potentially frying our CPU, we fired up Prime95 and watched as Intel’s thermal protection mechanism throttled the processor clock within about 20 seconds.

Although TurboV's Auto-Tuning feature is supposed to be easier to use for less experienced overclockers, it's unfortunate that it'd push such an aggressive voltage that isn't even useable without throttling, which inexperienced performance-seekers might not know to check for. Manual tuning became the safer choice for our efforts, then.

Picking settings ourselves, we were able to reach the same overclock using TurboV as we did using Asus' UEFI, and as we've established, some hardcore overclockers find programs like TurboV very useful for altering voltage and clock rates on-the-fly as they toy with extreme cooling methods.

Sliders are shown in their maximum position to indicate TurboV’s limits, though we never approached these in actual operation. “Advanced Mode” adds CSA, PLL, and PCH options to the basic set of voltage controls.

While we don’t believe many users will bother overclocking an Ivy Bridge-based processor’s integrated graphics core, Asus provides both frequency and voltage options in TurboV’s GPU Boost.

A separate menu provides CPU ratio selection in both synchronized and load-based settings. Though the slider is maxed, we never approached its maximum 63x multiplier in our own efforts.

P8Z77-V LX UEFI

Perhaps the biggest reputation-builder for Asus has been its feature-packed and easy-to-use firmware. The value-priced P8Z77-V LX continues that trend by providing most of the same settings as the company's more enthusiast-friendly models.

Ai Overclock Tuner remains, though it only has XMP and Manual configuration modes. CPU settings between these modes are nearly identical, as XMP users are expected to set this first. Switching between XMP and Manual modes does cause you to lose your CPU overclock settings.

Though 47 x 100 MHz wasn’t stable at our desired 1.25 V core setting, 46 x 102.2 MHz got us to 4.7 GHz. The most likely reason 47 x 100 didn’t work was that Asus’ 100 MHz setting provided an actual 100.3 MHz, resulting in a slightly higher 4.71 GHz.

Getting to 1.25 V under load required a combination of 1.245 V in the UEFI and a higher load line calibration setting. Our 1.65 V memory setting appears to have been set manually, but this change was performed by the firmware when we enabled XMP Profile 1.

Remarkable among budget-oriented enthusiast motherboards, the P8Z77-V LX includes primary, secondary, and tertiary timing controls.

Depending on what other settings are used, the multiplier changes might be blocked on the main Ai Tweaker menu. A fixed ratio can be set in its CPU Power Management submenu.

An Ultra High CPU Load-Line Calibration setting got our overclocked CPU core to the desired 1.25 V under load. We tried other load-line and core voltage settings and found these to most closely match our goals. The Digi+ VRM submenu also contains amperage limit and voltage regulator frequency settings.

More than double that of several competing products, eight customized UEFI configurations can be stored on the P8Z77-V LX.

Biostar TZ77XE3

Biostar has consistently marketed itself as the quintessential budget overclocking brand, and its TZ77XE3 continues that theme by presenting only the parts needed to make most systems perform better.

A low $130 price doesn’t get us any added interface controllers, though Biostar does use a slightly more expensive flat-black opaque mask to give its budget-oriented board the look of a high-end part. On top of that, we get the PCIe 3.0 switches needed to change from one x16 to two x8 PCI Express slots, plus a third 16-lane slot wired to support four lanes of second-gen PCIe for a potential three-way CrossFireX configuration.

Nvidia has too little faith in a four-lane PCIe 2.0 slot to permit three-way SLI. Yet, we still have to admit that Biostar beats ASRock (two x8 slots) and especially Asus (two slots running x16/x4) by way of graphics support at this price.

The TZ77XE3 also has a handy Port 80 diagnostics display to help overclockers interpret boot failures, and Biostar even includes bench-tester-friendly on-board power and reset buttons. Since those buttons are often inaccessible in a finished build and redundant to case buttons, we aren't giving away any value points for a feature that primarily seems to excite other reviewers.

Biostar’s overclocking theme extends to its voltage regulator, matching Asus' board with 16 phases. Asus claims a digital design advantage, while Biostar typically aims for increased capacity. Our overclocking tests have the potential to demonstrate which brand is best.

We always make a point to look over layout issues that novice builders often miss, but didn’t find anything seriously wrong in Biostar’s design. Its perpendicular SATA headers are, for example, low enough to clear extra-long double-slot graphics cards installed into the board’s middle slot, though a rare triple-slot card might run into issues. Older cases often lack the clearance to fit forward-facing cables, though, so perpendicular connectors have some merit in the budget market.

Locating the front-panel audio connector along the middle of the TZ77XE3’s back edge requires most builders to drag an ugly cable over the top of the board. Again, though, if you have an older case with a short front-panel cable, you'll find merit in this placement. Score another point for function dictating form.

Biostar's USB 3.0 front-panel header is placed just above the leading edge of the TZ77XE3’s third graphics slot. While this location should yield adequate clearance for nearly any graphics configuration, we simply couldn’t come up with a good reason for it to be there. Perhaps Biostar ran out of space to put it elsewhere when optimizing its circuit design for over-stock frequencies?

Biostar beats ASRock by including four SATA cables in the TZ77XE3’s installation kit, adds an extra CrossFire bridge, and further damages Asus by supporting SLI.

TZ77XE3 Applications

The TZ77XE3’s installation CD includes some useful utilities, as well as a few potential annoyances. For example, our experience with a competitor’s nagging Internet security software trial dissuaded us from installing the included Bullguard, though we found value in much of the remaining bundle.

For example, Biostar adds the full THX TruStudio Pro package, an application that ASRock’s version begged us to pay $25 for. With advanced features like active volume control and movie dialog enhancement, this difference could be worth as much as (or even more than) the extra SATA and USB 3.0 controllers offered by ASRock. The winner of that value comparison depends upon buyer preference.

Simplest of Biostar’s branded utilities is its eHot-Line email utility, which relies on your email client to send messages to Biostar Tech Support. That requirement makes eHot-Line more of a gimmick than a feature.

BIOS Live Update checks Biostar’s servers for the latest UEFI version.

Biostar also includes a utility to modify the UEFI’s boot-up splash screen. We’ve seen other manufacturers offer similar utilities in the past, but those manufacturers typically targeted white-box builders rather than enthusiasts.

BIO-Remote ties Biostar’s programs to specific buttons on Microsoft’s MCE Remote.

Biostar’s Green Power Utility saved us up to 3 W over CPU-based automatic power controls at idle.

Overclocking With Biostar Toverclocker

With few overclocking options enabled, Biostar uses monitoring pages to bulk-up its Toverclocker utility. The first two tabs, for instance, show CPU and memory status.

Overclocking settings are few, but they do work for the most part. We say “for the most part” because we were only able to increase our BCLK to 105 MHz on a CPU known to work at up to 109 MHz via UEFI changes. The utility also doesn’t recognize the TZ77XE3’s 300 MHz maximum base clock setting, though that hardly matters, given the roughly 110-112 MHz limit inherent to most LGA 1155-based platforms.

CPU core, memory, and chipset voltage levels can be adjusted via Biostar's app, but GPU voltage changes don’t work at all, while a system agent voltage entry appears missing from Toverclocker’s menu. We weren’t able to show maximum values in our screen shot because voltage changes are made in real-time, without the need or even the ability to click Apply.

An unfortunate lack of multiplier adjustment makes Toverclocker appear optimized only for low-end processors. Neophytes are welcome, however, to try Biostar’s V6 and V12 automatic overclocking profiles.

Biostar actually protects inexperienced users by creating V6 and V12 profiles without added CPU core voltage. But the resulting frequency increases are fairly small. The third choice, Auto, crashed our system.

Don't worry too much about the limited readings available in Toverclocker’s CPU and Memory monitoring menus, as a far greater selection of data exists across its three H/W Monitor pages.

TZ77XE3 UEFI

If low-cost overclocking is Biostar’s niche, then a solid UEFI has be its first priority. Biostar's O.N.E. menu has changed only slightly in the transition from BIOS to UEFI, retaining all of the straightforward functionality that overclockers love without the glamor and confusion introduced by some competitors.

CPU multiplier and base clock controls are found up top, followed by a few pertinent power settings. We were able to reach almost 4.7 GHz using 46 x 101.80 MHz, and the only thing that could have made those settings easier would have been a decimal point on the base clock menu.

Scrolling past a few more power settings, we were able to reach a DRAM data rate of nearly 2.7 GT/s with two modules installed. XMP works, but setting it blocks access to manual multiplier and timing adjustment. Switching back to manual frequencies also forces tuners to set all timings manually. The baseline are derived from SPD values rather than XMP timings, and automatic configuration doesn’t exist for individual settings.

Biostar's O.N.E. menu continues to display SPD timings rather than current timings, even after setting XMP. Users who want to use XMP values as a baseline for manual overclocking must instead rely on its Biostar Memory Insight submenu to see most of those timings. Unfortunately, the Biostar Memory Insight menu doesn’t show things like tREFI, and UEFI’s reversion to too-tight SPD values forced us to look at screen shots from competing products to see what the missing settings were actually supposed to be. Users who would like to manually configure their RAM but don’t have another motherboard to show them appropriate settings for unfamiliar timings might be stuck.

The TZ77XE4 supports CPU Vcore at both fixed levels and more energy-conscious offset modes. We achieved our 1.25 V full-load target using 1.230 V core with 0% Load Line. Wait, what?

Rather than list load-line as a positive compensation value, Biostar lists it as a negative stock value. So, 100% Load Line means 100% of Intel’s intended droop, and Disabled means 0% droop.

Scrolling a little further down the O.N.E. menu, we find DRAM voltage and the link to the previously-viewed Biostar Memory Insight submenu. Note that 1.620 V gets us to at least 1.644 V. The board responded to our memory’s 1.65 V XMP value by setting nearly 1.69 V!

Five custom UEFI configurations can be saved as user profiles at the bottom of the TZ77XE3’s Exit menu.

ECS Z77H2-A2X Deluxe

The Z77H2-A2X Deluxe continues ECS’ struggle to prove to the overclocking market that its mid-priced motherboards are stable and feature-packed. Having tested a few of the firm’s recent products, we find that its claims of overclocking stability are believable. What’s incredible to us is how unstable the company's prices are. We watched the Z77H2-A2X Deluxe drop from around $165 to around $145, and then shoot back up to $165 before we could publish our review. After hearing our concern, ECS reached an agreement with some of its channel partners to stabilize prices on new shipments at $160.

Now that the Z77H2-A2X Deluxe is once again able to compete with other boards in our sub-$160 story, we want to know how well it sizes up. An added pair of rear-panel USB 3.0 ports and eSATA are good steps towards securing the company's value goals.

Flipping to the top view, we discover four two-lane PCIe 3.0 pathway switches that allow a pair of x16 slots to go from x16-x0 to x8-x8 mode whenever a second graphics card is installed. Add to that a pair of voltage regulator heat sinks and a mini-PCIe slot that could be used for a notebook-style wireless card, and we’ve covered the full set of features that ECS uses to justify the Z77H2-A2X Deluxe’s price premium over less expensive competition, such as Asus' P8Z77-V LX.

ECS understands that some buyers make their purchase decision based on looks alone, so it applies the number 88 over the empty spot where a Port 80 diagnostics display is found on its higher-end models. Review readers aren’t so easily fooled.

The Z77H2-A2X Deluxe’s layout is good overall, with few concerns for users of certain older or low-cost cases. Those concerns include forward-facing SATA ports that almost butt up against the lower drive cage of many older cases, and a front-panel audio header that’s slightly out-of-reach for the short cables on a few poorly-designed cases. The easy solution to those worries is to choose a better chassis.

ECS includes six SATA cables and an SLI bridge in the Z77H2-A2X Deluxe installation kit. Those two extra cables likely cost pennies, but could save some builders a few dollars.

Z77H2-A2X Deluxe Applications

ECS' installation disk autoruns to reveal an exciting array of software, which we discovered is mostly garbage. For example, a bad system date following a firmware update lead us to these three screens:

The “Special Upgrade” price for Power Director 10 Ultra and Power DVD 12 Ultra are $80 and $85. We hope that CyberLink is paying ECS for that kind of advertising.

ECS' proprietary programs continue to function, such as its eBLU firmware updating utility. It found us an update that we didn’t even spot on the motherboard’s download page.

The eDLU utility opens an ECS webpage showing the latest drivers the firm has loaded for the detected motherboard.

The eSF utility is able to set a temperature-based fan speed slope. It was limited to CPU fan speed for this particular hardware configuration.

Overclocking With ECS eOC

ECS’ eOC utility opens to a page with two temperature readings, Platform Environment Control Interface and chipset. PECI is measured directly from the CPU’s thermal diode, in degrees below the processor’s thermal throttle point.

ECS mimics an older Gigabyte utility by putting only the CPU base clock on its Easy Tuning tab, but does one better by also showing the status of key voltage points.

The eOC Advanced tab provides all the features that the program can control through Windows. There are no multiplier settings, but base clock and voltage levels can be changed on the fly. Though we certainly would have liked to see multiplier controls on a separate page, Gigabyte could learn something from eOC’s simplified menu assortment.

The eOC Options page lets users decide if and how they’d like their overclock to be automatically applied: when booting, loading the program, or waking from sleep mode.

Z77H2-A2X Deluxe UEFI

ECS' M.I.B. X menu opens to reveal important voltage settings, including CPU core and Vdroop. Setting Vdroop to Disabled allows the system to keep voltage stable under increased load.

With Vdroop disabled, we found that our CPU climbed from 1.15 V at idle to 1.25 V under load using the Z77H2-A2X Deluxe’s 1.15 V setting. That voltage got our processor to a stable 4.69 GHz with all four cores fully taxed.

A mere 1.25 V isn’t enough to push 4.7 GHz from our chip on most motherboards, yet ECS still supported the 47x multiplier. An under-spec base clock of 99.7 MHz at the 100 MHz setting explains this discrepancy.

The Z77H2-A2X Deluxe supports Intel’s XMP technology to ease the overclocking of most DDR3 memory modules. Fortunately, the XMP timings stick when switching from XMP to Manual mode, and SPD timings stick when switching from full-auto to Manual mode.. Thus, we were able to keep our memory’s complete timing configuration while playing with its multipliers. Biostar could learn something from this.

ECS appears to learn from all of its competitors, expanding its overclocking profile storage to support up to eight custom UEFI configurations.

Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H

The Z77X-D3H is meant to thrill budget-oriented buyers and appease enthusiasts with its combination of design, mid-market features, and a moderate $145 price. Six I/O panel-based USB 3.0 ports, two added-on SATA 6Gb/s ports, and three x16-length PCIe slots are prominent among those features.

While we’re happy to see a board with such a robust combination of features sell for $15 less than this article’s price limit, there aren’t any magic bullets for its triple graphics slot configuration. We still get the same single x16 to twin x8 slot conversion from the processor’s sixteen PCIe 3.0 lanes, and the third slot is still a four-lane PCIe 2.0 product of the Z77 Express PCH. Gigabyte further warns that all three of the board’s x1 slots are disabled whenever a PCIe x4 (or larger) card is installed in the bottom slot, since only four of the chipset’s eight lanes are available for expansion. The aforementioned drive controllers, plus a network controller and PCIe-to-PCI switch, consume the chipset’s other four lanes.

Designed to support Intel’s SSD caching technology, an mSATA card slot centered beneath the CPU socket could potentially host a system drive now that 120 GB and 240 GB models are available in this format. Yet, because it borrows a SATA 3Gb/s port from the chipset, we wouldn’t count on it to deliver record-breaking performance. Nevertheless, the idea of building a gaming system without the messy drive cables intrigues us.

The Z77X-D3H’s layout is good overall, with forward-facing SATA ports preventing conflict with graphics cards and a front-panel USB 3.0 header mounted above the highest graphics slot to more-easily connect its ports. Gigabyte even puts an extra space between its two PCIe 3.0 slots to help cool double-slot graphics cards or allow for a pair of triple-slot boards.

That doesn’t make the layout perfect for everyone, however. For example, we’ve noted for years that some case companies use front-panel audio cables that are approximately 1” too short to reach a bottom-rear-corner header, and Gigabyte only helps that condition by moving its header forward about half of the necessary distance. Also, several older/cheaper cases block access to the front edge of full-ATX motherboards, blocking access to forward-facing SATA ports. Both of those problems can be solved easily by simply choosing a better case. We at least need to warn anyone looking to purchase this board to upgrade an older system, though.

The Z77X-D3H is also one of the few enthusiast-oriented motherboards to include a four-pin ATX12V, rather than an eight-pin EPS12V, CPU power connector. Mainstream power regulators live well within the confines of a four-pin connector, but we find it odd that Gigabyte admits this in its design decision. A larger 8-pin connector gives competitors the appearance of greater power capacity.

The Z77X-D3H includes four SATA cables, which is two times more than some of its competitors. We also find an SLI bridge in the box. Most buyers who need a CrossFire bridge should look for one bundled with their graphics card.

Z77X-D3H Applications

Gigabyte includes a huge software bundle with its latest motherboards, offering, for example, three different adware trial version Internet security suites. Moving past those annoyances, we did find a few gems.

Audio Deck, for the integrated Via Envy codec, provides an old-fashioned multi-channel positioning diagram to accompany the settings that might otherwise take normal users a while to find in Windows.

Gigabyte @BIOS downloads the latest firmware directly from Gigabyte’s server.

Users can choose their own BIOS splash screen from several published by Gigabyte, or use their favorite search engine to find forums for help in creating their own.

Gigabyte’s 3D Power controller repeats several of the 3D Power settings from the Z77X-D3H’s firmware. From our standpoint, all of these features could have been combined on a single page of the company's Easy Tune6 utility.

Gigabyte Smart Recovery 2 provides an easy way to back up your drive or specific folders to a second drive.

Gigabyte Update Manager checks for updates to many of Gigabyte’s brand-specific applications. So, where are the gems we spoke of?

Overclocking With Easy Tune6

Gigabyte’s Easy Tune6 utility reflects both the usefulness and cumbersomeness of its firmware. The first menus, for example, contain no settings, though they are far more detailed than those in the popular CPU-Z application.

One of the added details that we’d like to see adopted by CPU-Z is the ability to read more than three SPD, XMP, and/or EPP registers. Easy Tune6 provides ten, though it does not tell us that one of these is XMP.

Quick Boost quickly got us to 4.18, 4.44, and 4.69 GHz at 1.32 to 1.33 V. While we still think that’s a little too much to protect the longevity of our Ivy Bridge-based CPU, it’s far less voltage than many of its competitors use for similar speeds. Perhaps ironically, the Auto Tuning option achieved worse overclocking results (4.49 GHz at 1.32 V), and we never successfully reset the program. After successfully altering several settings only to have the system revert to old Auto Tuning levels at the next reboot, we gave up and removed Easy Tune6 before reinstalling it to continue our evaluation.

The only visible difference between the Easy and Advanced overclocking tabs is the presence of memory ratio control. Base clock can be changed on the fly, but memory ratio changes require a reboot. That’s probably why Gigabyte wasted two tabs to separate these; a few words of warning would have sufficed.

Ratio and Frequency tabs are only active in Advanced mode. Per-core and all-core changes can be set, but a reboot is required to make the change. Given that memory ratios also require a reboot, that’s one more tab Gigabyte could have consolidated.

Easy Tune6 has enough voltage options that they actually deserve their own menu. Like base clock, voltages can be changed without rebooting.

Gigabyte’s Graphics overclocker worked with all of the GeForce GTX 580s in our test lab, though firmware customization could prevent its use with some brands.

Separate menus provide temperature-based CPU and system fan speed control.

Two menus under the HW Monitor tab provide extremely limited voltage readouts and status alarm controls.

Z77X-D3H UEFI

Gigabyte’s Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker menu opens to reveal a few key status readings and a short list of submenus.

The Advanced Frequency Settings submenu might have otherwise been called a CPU menu, if not for the redundant memory multiplier setting. We reached a stable 4.66 GHz at our target 1.25 V. A submenu there reveals further CPU settings, including per-core and all-core multiplier options.

Setting Intel Turbo Boost technology to Disabled doesn’t completely disable it, but instead disables the CPU’s ability to manage its own clock speed in response to CPU load. This allowed us to more easily seek the maximum stable frequency for four-core loads without worrying about how much further the CPU would try to scale on its own in less demanding tasks.

The Advanced Memory Settings submenu contains the memory multiplier plus a few timing mode settings. Changing DRAM Timing Selectable from Auto enables the two Timing Settings submenus at the bottom of the page, where "Quick" links the timings of both channels and "Expert” enables per-channel timing settings.

An individual Auto option for each memory timing allows tuners to change only the timings they're familiar with. Setting an XMP profile on the previous menu causes each Auto timing to change from its original SPD to the corresponding XMP value.

Gigabyte’s Advanced Voltage Settings menu appears to be its biggest step toward inflating menu complexity. It merely contains three sub-submenu links.

Advanced Voltage Control is the one menu in Gigabyte’s UEFI structure with enough settings to justify its extra page. Of these, we found setting Vcore Loadline Calibration to High kept our CPU voltage stable under changing loads.

While CPU and DRAM voltage levels could have been incorporated into the CPU and DRAM settings menus, Gigabyte could have satisfied our drive for simplicity by at least combining these into one extra page rather than two. The Vcore setting is fairly accurate for low-load conditions, and Loadline Calibration can be used to keep voltage stable at higher CPU loads.

After experiencing some extremely good two-DIMM memory overclocks, we stuck a voltage meter on the board and found that the actual voltage is 0.03 V higher than both the settings and readings from the board. That is to say, setting 1.62 V got us our desired 1.65 V, even though both the firmware and Gigabyte’s monitoring utility reported 1.62 V.

Up to eight custom UEFI configurations can be stored as user profiles on the Z77X-D3H.

Intel DZ77SL-50K

Intel’s latest effort to establish itself as an enthusiast-oriented motherboard vendor comes from the amazingly low-priced DZ77SL-50K. The company knows that its customers don’t expect big features at this price, so it instead aims for budget-oriented enthusiasts with its reputation for stability and an overall clean aesthetic.

Intel’s famous Back to BIOS button is missing from this particular model, though overclockers will still find the setup jumper on the board’s top. Enabling it allows the motherboard to bypass current settings and boot using defaults, whereby users can enter UEFI, see the settings that prevented their system from starting up, and make any needed changes.

The scarcity of add-in features could have also made this a great board for white-box builders, except for its lack of DVI and VGA ports. The solder points for several of the board’s omitted features are easily seen in the above photo, while the below photo also shows the omitted serial and parallel ports used almost exclusively in commercial and industrial environments. We wouldn’t be surprised to see multiple variations of this PCB bearing different model names.

The DZ77SL-50K is one of only two products in today’s round-up expressly designed not to support high-bandwidth dual-card graphics arrays, as the cost of the associated PCIe switches would have prevented this from being the least-expensive product reviewed. Instead, we find an open-ended second-gen PCIe x4 slot, which supports the added length of a secondary PCIe x16 graphics card through that slotted end. The bandwidth may not be appropriate for games, but you could drop a secondary card in to add more monitor outputs.

Although it seems to be missing two SATA 3Gb/s ports from the Z77 chipset’s controller, those ports were simply moved: one to the I/O panel (eSATA) and the other to an outward-facing port located slightly behind the front-facing SATA 3Gb/s ports. That single outward-facing port could potentially be blocked by a long graphics card in the x4 slot, but we don’t think any experienced builder would put a big graphics card in such a low-bandwidth slot.

The same can be said of the internal USB 3.0 header, since it’s found between the PCIe x4 and first PCI slot. This could potentially be blocked by a single-slot graphics card, however, so we think that Intel could have thought that placement out a little better.

Some users trying to upgrade older systems will find the bottom-rear corner header for front-panel audio to be beyond the reach of their cables, and others may find that an older case's lower drive cage blocks access to the forward-facing SATA ports. But both issues were addressed a long ago by most chassis manufacturers and shouldn't be a problem for new builds.

Intel proves its environmental commitment by including only a basic installation sheet in the DZ77SL-50K kit, relying on the bundled software disc to hold the full-length manual. There definitely aren't any resources wasted on unneeded cables either, since the two included are required by most users to install one hard drive and one optical drive.

DZ77SL-50K Applications

Intel includes a significant software bundle with the DZ77SL-50K, though much of it is trialware. That applies to both its ESET and Norton security suites.

Laplink’s PC Mover is also included, which appears to be a great way to migrate applications. This version is unfortunately limited to three program transfers, and warns that even those three might not work. We recommend searching your favorite apps for compatibility with this program before bothering to try it.

On the other hand, Splashtop Remote Desktop really does work (at least on other people’s hardware). It enables enhanced remote desktop capabilities from portable devices, and the software looks promising (in other people's videos). Locked in an office with only his work, this editor doesn’t have any portable devices (Ed.: Sad face).

Going beyond its manufacturing partner’s splash screen apps, Intel Integrator Tool Kit offers the level of firmware customization needed to make every builder a baby Dell. Unfortunately, none of its recent firmware files had the proper extension to work with this program.

Our criticism of Gigabyte’s monitoring menu sprawl appears harsh in retrospect. Intel Desktop Utilities provides all of the hardware information we would want, but we’re fairly certain that the firm could have picked a more compact way to display it.

A spread-out selection of system status menus wouldn’t matter to many users if it didn’t also come with an equally-excessive alarm settings group.

We have not yet mentioned Virtu MVP software in our coverage of other boards because we thought it was universal across the full range of enthusiast-oriented Z77 motherboards. Intel's DZ77SL-50K instead includes Virtu Universal, without the HyperFormance mode available in MVP.

Overclocking With Intel Extreme Tuning Utility

Intel doesn’t seem to want you to use its Extreme Tuning Utility. How else could we explain why it isn’t mentioned in the motherboard’s software suite, or referred to on the motherboard’s product page? How else could we explain why it isn’t even listed as compatible for recent motherboards, or that motherboards are only added to its list after they’ve fallen out of our spotlight?

XTU is likely intended for “in the know” overclocking exhibitionists and members of the press who usually get their hardware long before our round-ups are published. Most end-users are forced to search for it, and the lack of references to the name makes that search even more difficult.

XTU’s system information tab provides basic information about your software and hardware configuration, but lacks most of the status readings found in its Desktop Utilities application. The pair might be complementary.

Manual Tuning controls primarily focus on increasing the power ceiling for overcurrent protection, with voltage increases limited to Additional Turbo Voltage. We're showing everything maxed out, but the only part of the program we really used was its base clock controls. We’ll discuss the reason for this on the next page.

Intel has its own stress-testing program, which many professional-level overclockers use to prove that their systems are stable.

As in the UEFI, a complete set of XTU values can be saved as an overclocking profile.

DZ77SL-50K UEFI

Intel’s newest UEFI opening screen reads “Welcome to the Future of BIOS.” That ambitious-sounding statement accompanies menus that primarily focus on pre-programmed overclocking techniques.

Fortunately, a small tab on the top of the above menu switches us to Classic Mode, where we can cover all of the important manual overclock settings within a few pages.

Though it's now more colorful and sports spiffier icons compared to Intel’s previous UEFI, the Performance tab of Classic mode still provides only a few overclock settings, of which Host Clock Frequency is primary.

Even after disabling low power states and setting Processor Idle State to “High”, our CPU would idle down when not loaded. Full load voltage was our biggest problem, though, as the shift from partial to full load caused a voltage spike of around 50 mV, even with Processor VR Droop Control set to “High V-droop”. Things got even worse at lower Vdroop modes, forcing us to use the 1.205 V setting to reach our 1.25V full-load goal.

Our maximum stable CPU clock dropped to 4.64 GHz. Less than 2% behind today’s leader, the compromise appears barely worth mentioning in spite of the time we wasted trying to overcome it.

Intel doesn’t offer automatic settings for individual timings, but gives us the same benefits in a different way. Switching from Auto to Manual modes causes the board to retain SPD values, while switching from an XMP profile to Manual modes causes the board to retain those XMP timings. This allowed us to adjust the memory’s data rate without taking time to manually configure XMP values, though the maximum multiplier supported by this board (DDR3-2400) is actually lower than our memory’s DDR3-2666 rating.

Up to five custom UEFI configurations can be saved as user profiles on the DZ77SL-50K.

MSI Z77A-G45

Two enormous voltage regulator heat sinks, three graphics card slots, and an I/O panel full of connectors are perfect examples of how MSI sees its Z77A-G45 taking back the value crown from a certain similarly-priced competitor. Aesthetics aside, we’ll put those big sinks to use in our heat and overclocking analysis.

Those three long slots are configured as x16-x0-x4 or x8-x8-x4, with the four-lane slot deriving its connectivity from the Z77 PCH. That actually makes this a two-way SLI motherboard, according to both its slot configuration and its silk-screened logo, with the top two slots sharing the CPU’s sixteen PCIe 3.0 lanes. Three-way CrossFireX is available via the third slot, but we wouldn’t hamper any high-end card with so little bandwidth. These slots put the Z77A-G45’s graphics capability on-par with the more-expensive Gigabyte and ECS products in today’s comparison.

The biggest problem with the slots is not configuration, but documentation. MSI refers to the Z77A-G45 as three-way SLI-compatible, but Nvidia doesn’t support a third card through the slower four-lane, second-gen slot. And the documentation foibles don’t end there, as both the manual and specifications page try to convince us that both slots are 16-lane-capable. Four two-lane pathway switches above the top x16 slot let us know otherwise, and we think (or at least hope) that these documentation mistakes were accidental.

MSI saves one of the Z77’s PCIe 2.0 lanes by omitting the PCIe-to-PCI bridge needed by certain competing boards to support legacy slots, and then uses it on a PCIe-based network controller. Only three PCIe 2.0 lanes remain to feed four x1 slots, so MSI decided to connect both of the center x1 slots to the same pathway. These can’t be used simultaneously. Appearing to be a blatant move to artificially bolster the board’s spec sheet, we think MSI should have simply left off the x1 slot immediately below the top x16 interface. The GPU coolers of most high-performance graphics cards cover that slot anyway.

MSI doesn’t include a Port 80 diagnostics display to assist overclocking diagnostics, but does add a row of voltage checking points near the board’s front edge to address an overclocker’s voltage monitoring needs.

The Z77A-G45’s layout is fairly straightforward without any major issues to affect a majority of new builds. Users upgrading older systems may find that their hard drive cage blocks access to the board’s forward-facing SATA and USB 3.0 slots, or even that their front-panel audio cables are too short to reach the bottom-rear corner header. If either of these appear in doubt, we recommend starting your upgrade with a better case.

The Z77A-G45 we received was packaged for a different region, without the SLI bridge we would have expected. A quick check with one of our favorite vendors showed that U.S.-destined boards do get that part, but are still limited to two SATA cables.

Z77A-G45 Applications

MSI has shifted more of its attention to freeware and trial software in the Z77A-G45. The company still has a few applications of its own, however, though a few of them simply replicate Windows features.

For example, MSI Easy Viewer and Video Genie are very basic photo viewing and gamma-correcting apps. They’re redundant to our system’s basic operating system and driver features.

Live Update 5 is slightly more useful, as it can be set to automatically locate driver and BIOS updates. Selecting the “Total Installer” button allows manually-checked updates to be downloaded and installed semi-automatically.

MSI Network Genie provides very basic packet prioritization control. The simplified menu is probably more than most users need, but we have a feeling that those who like it may eventually begin searching for additional features.

MSI spent a bunch of time marketing “Click BIOS II”, a Windows-based program that replicates its firmware menu. It’s unfortunately very slow to respond when used with this version of the Z77A-G45 firmware. It changes firmware settings and, like firmware, requires a reboot to affect those changes.

MSI uses the same THX TruStudio Pro package as Biostar, with the same range of benefits.

While Intel scales back it’s Lucidlogix software to the Virtu Universal package, MSI doesn’t offer it at all. Though it is on the installation disk, Virtu MVP installs only in trial mode and can’t be registered.

Overclocking With MSI Control Center

Unlike its Click BIOS II for Windows, MSI’s Control Center allows users to change multiple settings on the fly. We were able to verify that voltage, base clock, CPU multiplier, and memory timing controls operate as they should.

We did need to reboot the system once to activate real-time CPU multiplier controls, but that’s likely because a setting had to be changed at the firmware level. The program worked flawlessly after that.

Intel uses various Turbo Boost ratios to maximize CPU performance within a certain power threshold, yet overclockers can sometimes benefit from similar multiplier schemes to stay within a peak thermal threshold. We’re interested in maximum stable clock (best-case scenario) at maximum possible load (worst-case scenario), so a single multiplier is better for our tests.

We were also able to set memory timings on-the-fly, but only after changing from per-channel timings (Channel A or Channel B) to all-channel timings (Channel AB) at the top of the above menu.

MSI Control Center has an OC Genie automatic overclocking program, which is supposed to achieve an optimized overclock. The program appears optimized for efficiency, though, only pushing our CPU to 4.20 GHz at 1.10 V. It also chose our slower memory’s DDR3-2133 XMP profile.

Though Control Center also has a Green Power page, fan speed was the only thing we were able to set.

Z77A-G45 UEFI

MSI’s UEFI hasn’t changed noticeably in the past year, still placing the greatest visual priority on the system clock and the least visual priority on truly useful settings. Fortunately, the array of available settings is plentiful.

Base clock and CPU multiplier controls top the Z77A-G45’s OC menu. We were able to reach 4.65 GHz at our target 1.25 V when pairing these settings with a Vdroop Offset Control of 100%.

Unfortunately, we found that set voltage levels weren’t accurate whatsoever, requiring 1.235 V CPU core and 1.6330 V DIMM settings to reach our desired 1.25 V and 1.65 V. Using the 1.25 V setting with a lower Vdroop Offset Control simply allowed the CPU voltage to drop under load while remaining high at idle.

The Z77A-G45 allows the CPU multiplier to be raised as other features of Intel Turbo Boost technology are disabled.

Individual memory timings can be left in auto mode, while others are manually configured. MSI also allows XMP profiles to set the timings baseline by choosing the profile first, then manually altering other values (including memory ratio).

Up to six custom firmware configurations can be saved on the Z77A-G45 as overclocking profiles.

Benchmark Settings And Peripheral Compatibility Testing

While G.Skill’s F3-17600CL9Q-16GBXLD provides the default DDR3-1600 CAS 9 settings we want for benchmarks, it’s no longer fast enough to push the limits of today’s best memory controllers. The firm provided a set of its F3-2666C11Q-16GTXD Trident X DDR3-2666 specifically to extend our overclocking capabilities.

We’re shifting focus towards features in this month’s comparison, and one of the features we noticed lacking was the ability of some manufacturers to support certain peripherals in firmware (or DOS mode). We purchased keyboards and mice from Microsoft and Logitech, plus a Saitek keyboard and Razer mouse, to verify this problem.

The good news is that ASRock, Asus, and MSI supported all combinations of hardware through both Windows and UEFI, which is important when certain UEFI features are accessible only via mouse.

This version of Gigabyte’s Z77X-D3H firmware didn’t fare as well, with the Razer mouse moving very slowly and clicking inconsistently. It was possible to use it for UEFI configuration, but doing so took much patience.

Biostar’s TZ77XE3 had trouble with the Logitech mouse; the cursor would move vertically, but not horizontally.

ECS and Intel exhibited both problems, with the Razer mouse movement becoming so unpredictable that sometimes the cursor moved backwards. The issue was somewhat amusing on the Intel platform, since this problem occurred only after we updated its UEFI.

The reason for the DZ77SL-50K’s regressive compatibility is that we were forced to go backwards with its firmware. Our rules for participation specifically stated that all firmware must be available for public download, and the version Intel delivered on its sample was not. This rule was intended to prevent cheating, as some of its manufacturing partners have accused each other of optimizing firmware for specific review configurations.

When testing products of different technology, a real-world benchmark set helps us determine real-world performance differences. Yet, today’s boards use the same technology, and synthetics are more useful for finding the cause of performance deficits. Performance parity between all properly-design Z77 motherboards has forced us to look for problems rather than solutions.

Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11

We thought that, all things being equal, 3DMark could show us whether any particular product was broken or artificially boosted. Unfortunately, equal hardware doesn’t always translate to equal performance. Two of the boards in today’s round-up didn’t include Lucidlogix's performance-boosting Virtu MVP software.

Besides giving the program additional resources through the processor’s integrated GPU, Virtu MVP adds a little more variability to the already slightly-inconsistent 3DMark scoring system. Yet, the trend is clear. 3DMark favors boards that use MVP technology.

The biggest performance boost for MVP software comes in 3DMark’s graphics test.

Performance deficits are what we really wanted to look for, since these boards are equipped with the same basic hardware. ECS’ Z77H2-A2X Deluxe appears to have slightly lower CPU performance, as reflected in 3DMark’s Physics score.

Benchmark Results: PCMark And Sandra

We’re still primarily looking for broken parts or artificially inflated scores (and hoping not to find any). PCMark shows the performance parity we expected.

Ocassionally, we find a company trying to beat the system by altering its base clock setting to operate beyond the 100 MHz specification. With a stock BCLK overclock of only 0.03%, Asus’s P8Z77-V LX finds itself atop Sandra’s CPU Arithmetic chart.

Asus’ tiny lead continues through Sandra's Multi-Media module.

ECS falls to the bottom of an otherwise-mundane Sandra Memory Bandwidth chart, while Biostar, Gigabyte, and Asus pick up a few nanoseconds in its Memory Latency tests. Tighter default timings can lead to lower DRAM overclocks, so we’re interested to see how these three boards fare in our overclocking evaluation.

Power, Heat, And Efficiency

ECS might claim that its $160 board has the most features, but that still doesn’t excuse a full-load power increase so large. We’d expect no more than a few watts of difference, similar to what we see between Asus and Intel at the miserly end of the scale.

Those huge heat sinks that MSI uses to make its Z77A-G45 looks like a top overclocker do have real functionality, dropping its voltage regulator temperature by around 10° compared to Asus' uncovered P8Z77-V LX.

Gigabyte, Asus, and Biostar top our average performance chart, which should help to boost each vendor's efficiency scores.

High performance and low power consumption put Asus' reduced-feature P8Z77-V LX at the top of our efficiency charts. Biostar’s similarly-barren board takes second place.

Overclocking

In spite of cooling differences, Asus’ hot-running P8Z77-V LX tops our CPU overclocking chart, while MSI’s cold-blooded Z77-G45 falls to the bottom.

Gigabyte’s Z77X-D3H takes the lead in base clock, accomplishing the highest reference frequency this processor has ever seen! This astonishing feat should be most significant to builders who can’t afford one of Intel’s unlocked K-series processors.

Intel uses 21.33x as its highest memory multiplier, and doing so leaves the DZ77SL-50K stuck with sub-2200 MT/s data rates. ASRock and Asus are on par, with MSI only slightly behind.

Three Sub-$160 Motherboards Rise To The Top

Asus and Gigabyte both notified us that they didn't feel our previous round-up’s price-per-performance chart properly reflected the cost of value-added features, a fact that had already been noted in that round-up. Rather than use the same chart as our starting point today, we are choosing to use actual prices, and then figure out whether each step up in functionality is worth paying more money.

Our chart begins with Intel’s DZ77SL-50K, which beats Asus’ P8Z77-V LX in only one area: the heat sink covering the primary part of its voltage regulator. Asus gives us VGA and DVI ports, an optical audio connector, and Lucid Virtu MVP software, so both boards are close to comparable when it comes to features-per-dollar. Asus rises to the top, though, because of its superior overclocking capability.

But Asus can't stand up to Biostar so easily. For the same price, the TZ77XE3 delivers real SLI support, a low-performance third graphics slot that’s as fast as Asus’ second slot, heat sinks on both sides of its voltage regulator, a Port 80 diagnostics display for easier overclocking diagnostics, twice as many analog audio outputs, and the full TruStudio Pro audio software suite. The TZ77XE3 doesn’t overclock as well as the P8Z77-V LX, but it’s close.

For another $5, ASRock’s Z77 Extreme4 adds an extra pair of USB 3.0 ports and an extra pair of SATA 6Gb/s connectors. It does not support a third graphics card, but the chipset these boards use can’t do that properly anyway. We can’t concede value leadership to ASRock’s extra controllers though, because the board also gives up the TruStudio Pro suite that’s probably about as valuable as one of those two extra on-board chips. That makes the Z77 Extreme4 a value match to the TZ77XE3, with user preference determining the true winner.

MSI’s Z77A-G45 comes with huge heat sinks that enable the low voltage regulator temperatures we crave. But looking past that slight thermal advantage, the board is otherwise equipped similarly to the TZ77XE3. MSI gives up the Port 80 diagnostics display, but gives back a row of handy voltage detection points along the board’s front edge. Showing similar worth from the hardware side, MSI’s $10 higher price makes the value argument much more difficult. And that’s before we consider that the board doesn’t include Virtu MVP software to make better use of Intel’s integrated GPUs.

Climbing the budget ladder another $5, Gigabyte’s Z77X-D3H needs to prove that it’s worth $15 more than Biostar’s TZ77XE3. For that price difference we get four extra USB 3.0 ports plus a pair of added SATA 3Gb/s ports. Those four 5 Gb/s ports have to share a single 5 Gb/s pathway (if they're all being taxed at the same time), so we’re a little split on the amount of added value. Gigabyte also loses the Port 80 display, gains a handy mSATA interface that takes away one of the SATA ports, keeps Virtu MVP, but loses TruStudio Pro. Gigabyte’s firmware and EasyTune6 overclocking software are also easier to use than Biostar’s. This combination only puts the $145 Z77X-D3H on par with the $130 TZ77XE3’s value, however, so we still can't pick a winner.

All of these comparisons put ECS’ $160 Z77H2-A2X Deluxe in a tough fight for value leadership, since its feature set resembles that of the $135 Z77 Extreme4.

Consequently, our seven-way Z77 Express-based motherboard comparison ends in a three-way value tie between the Biostar TZ77XE3, ASRock Z77 Extreme4, and Gigabyte Z77X-D3H. None of the three boards earn a definitive victory, so they receive our Tom's Hardware Approved award, indicating superiority over the rest of today's field.

Paying The Price For Ambition

System Builder Marathon, June 2012: The Articles

Here are links to each of the four articles in this quarter’s System Builder Marathon (we’ll update them as each story is published). And remember, these systems are all being given away at the end of the marathon.

To enter the giveaway, please fill out this SurveyGizmo form, and be sure to read the complete rules before entering!

Day 1: The $2000 Performance PC
Day 2: The $1000 Enthusiast PC
Day 3: The $500 Gaming PC
Day 4: Performance And Value, Dissected

Introduction

For most of us, PC building, like life itself, is full of compromises. We need to balance limited resources, whether it's time, money, or energy. When we fail, we suffer the consequences of poor management. Our goals and desires often cause us to push up to and beyond our limits. As it turns out, this life lesson directly relates to the planning, design, and outcome of today’s gaming system.

The plan of attack for last quarter's $650 Gaming PC ignored the CPU-heavy leaning of our overall performance score to focus on one specific purpose: a better native resolution gaming experience. While the machine’s Core i3 processor fell flat in our productivity and content creation apps, its higher-end graphics card delivered better gaming performance at 1920x1080 in five of our six games. More importantly, a couple of specific quality settings became playable for the first time.

Here's our warning upfront: this quarter's system makes no attempt to earn favor as the most balanced platform, nor does it represent a gaming configuration Tom’s Hardware recommends. This time, we went far more extreme. Despite the 23% budget reduction, we made an experimental, all-out effort to maintain playable performance using the native 1920x1080 screens that many value-oriented enthusiasts still want to use.

Shaving $150 off an already-modest budget is bound to hurt performance, particularly since we're spending half of our funds just to cover necessary supporting components (before we're even able to consider the processor and graphics card we want). A slight reduction in storage capacity left us with $260 to split between these two important components.

We had a number of attractive options on the table, some of them more tempting than the one we eventually chose. For starters, we could have paired a capable Core i3-2100 with modest Radeon HD 6850 or GeForce GTX 460 graphics. Either one of those cards could have driven an overclockable AMD FX-4100 platform, leaving us an extra $10 to throw at a beefier motherboard, memory kit, or cooler. Or, we could have mated the well-priced Radeon HD 6870 to the proven Pentium G850. That last option struck me, personally, as the one with the most potential for smooth gaming performance.

But I already knew that, from last December’s system, even a potent Sandy Bridge-based Core i5 isn't enough for the Radeon HD 6870 to shine in all of our tests at 1920x1080. So, I threw caution to the wind and sought maximum 3D might, ending up with a GeForce GTX 560 Ti in what could otherwise be considered a $290 general-purpose machine.

CPU And Cooler

Processor: Intel Celeron G530

The 2.4 GHz Celeron G530 is the least-expensive dual-core CPU available for Intel's LGA 1155 interface, and it's the most affordable desktop processor I’d consider for any gaming build.

An additional $20 could have landed us a Pentium G620, which would contribute an extra 200 MHz and 1 MB of shared L3 cache, totaling 3 MB. It still would have been a dual-core chip, though, with a fixed clock rate and DDR3-1066 memory controller. We would have missed Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading technologies still.

Read Customer Reviews of Intel's Celeron G530 

CPU Cooler: Intel Retail Boxed Heat Sink And Fan

The boxed cooler consists of a familiar orb-style aluminum heat sink, a low speed PWM-controlled fan, and a push-pin mounting bracket. It's nothing fancy, but it gets the job done in light of this platform's inability to overclock.

Motherboard And Memory

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61MA-D3V

Gigabyte's microATX H61MA-D3V separates itself from less expensive H61 Express-based boards with features like a 16-lane PCI Express slot capable of accommodating an Ivy Bridge processor and running at third-gen data rates, two USB 3.0 connectors, two SATA 6Gb/s ports enabled by a Marvell add-in controller, an all-solid capacitor design, and Gigabyte’s UEFI DualBIOS technology. Available with a $10 savings this month, I couldn't see spending any less on the system’s platform.

Read Customer Reviews of Gigabyte's H61MA-D3V

Memory: 4 GB Pareema DDR3-1333 MD313C80809L2

The Celeron G530’s memory controller limits data rates to 1066 MT/s, so we looked to spend as little as possible on system RAM. Compatible 4 GB kits started at $20. And while the one we chose may not be well-known, it is earning high-enough ratings from Newegg's customers that we felt comfortable giving it a shot. We’ll be underclocking this RAM, hoping for lower latencies.

Read Customer Reviews of Pareema's MD313 C80809L2 4 GB Kit

Graphics Card And Hard Drive

Graphics: ECS NGT560TI-1GPI-F1 GeForce GTX 560 Ti

As the only GeForce GTX 560 Ti available within our budget, we could easily give ECS credit for shaping today's experimental build.

While its 823 MHz core frequency, 1002 MHz (4008 MT/s) memory clock, and dual-DVI/mini-HDMI outputs adhere to Nvidia's reference design, ECS hides a rather unique 6.5" PCB under its 9.5" cooler.

Read Customer Reviews of ECS' NGT560TI-1GPI-F1 GeForce GTX 560 Ti

Despite the affordable price tag, ECS doesn’t hold back on extras, bundling a user manual, driver DVD, DVI-to-VGA adapter, mini-HDMI adapter, and a pair of  power adapters,

Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Blue WD3200AAKX 320 GB

Making this build happen for $500 required a small compromise in storage capacity, which shouldn't be surprising considering 500 GB drives are still 100% more expensive than the one we used in our $500 Gaming PC this time last year.

Western Digital’s WD320AAKX offers 320 GB of space, a 7200 RPM spindle, SATA 6Gb/s compatibility, and a 16 MB cache. Best of all, it sells for our $75 affordability ceiling.

Read Customer Reviews of Western Digital's Caviar Blue WD3200AAKX 320 GB

Case, Power Supply, And Optical Drive

Case: Rosewill R101-P-BK MicroATX Mid Tower

The fit and finish details of the Rosewill chassis we used last quarter left us impressed. But we had concerns about the structural rigidity around back, also finding cable management to be a chore. So, we looked at different enclosure options for today's machine. 

Although it’s only 1.25" taller, the mid-tower R101-P-BK sports three external 5.25” bays and six 3.5” bays. The inclusion of a 120 mm exhaust fan, adequate room to house our components, and an affordable $30 price tag were our three main considerations for giving Rosewill another shot this quarter.

Read Customer Reviews of Rosewill R101-P-BK Mid-Tower

Power Supply: Antec VP-450 450 W

Since our ECS GeForce GTX 560 Ti comes with a power adapter, we knew we could count on Antec's affordable VP-450 to drive our system. The combined +12 V rating of 30 A is plenty for our needs, while a quiet 120 mm fan, protection circuitry, and Antec’s two-year warranty add to this PSU's value.

Read Customer Reviews of Antec's VP-450 450 W PSU

Optical Drive: LG 22x DVD Burner SATA Model GH22NS90B-OEM

We don't have a lot of room to splurge on fancy optical drives here, so we always look to spend as little as possible on a reliable SATA-based DVD burner. This time around we chose the same favorably-reviewed 22x LG model that served our needs back in March.

Read Customer Reviews of LG's GH22NS90B-OEM 22x DVD Burner

Assembling Our Budget Box And Limited Overclocking

Building our $500 gaming rig was a simple, snag-free procedure. Most of the comments worth mentioning center on our $30 Rosewill microATX enclosure.

This rather small mid-tower case is noticeably heavier than the chassis we utilized last round. Double-boxed for added protection, its gross shipping weight was 50% greater. With more concessions for additional drives in a simislarly-sized enclosure, we were left with quite a bit less room for add-in cards. Our 9.5” GeForce GTX 560 Ti had to be angled a bit during installation. Once it was seated, though, it had about half of an inch of clearance between its shroud and the drive cage. Installed, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti does block the two center bays, though.

We again have to criticize Gigabyte's SATA port placement. Installing a dual-slot graphics card renders two of the H61 chipset's integrated ports inaccessible. The problem isn't huge, since we still have access to a pair of integrated connectors, along with two SATA 6Gb/s-capable ports, enabled by a Marvell controller.

Gigabyte bundled two cables with 90-degree SATA connectors in our retail package, rather than including one straight cable, as it did last quarter. This almost presented a problem. The cable either interfered with the graphics card or the bottom of the case, depending on the bay we used for mounting our hard drive.

Cable management was much easier this time around, though. In fact, we didn't use a single tie-strap in our system photos, just to show that it could be done. The enclosure itself also benefited from improved rear-panel rigidity, addressing one of our major concerns last time around. Unfortunately, slightly warped side panels were far more difficult to remove and install. Once they were locked down by thumbscrews, they wouldn't quite line up precisely with the front bezel.

Finally, although I was pleasantly surprised by the quietness of last quarter's 80 mm exhaust and 120 mm intake fans, it turns out that this enclosure's single 120 mm exhaust cooler isn't as quiet. It didn't hum or tick, but the sound of air turbulence made it the most obviously-audible fan in the system. As someone who appreciates a quiet PC, I would probably replace the cooler or experiment with a step down to 5, 7, or 9 V.

Overclocking

With no access to base clock settings, multiplier ratios, or memory data rates above 1066 MT/s, we’re limited once again to pushing lower latencies for any performance increase. Automatic memory timings dialed in 7-7-7-19 at 1.5 V. With a bump to 1.6 V, we found stability at 6-6-6-14 1T. Like last quarter, every attempt to manually adjust memory timings was answered by rapid beeps and a power cycle. The new timings were eventually applied after the restart.

MSI Afterburner served our purposes for overclocking ECS' GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Since I haven't been overly aggressive with our last few Radeon cards, staying within the bounds of AMD Overdrive, we didn't make any attempt to alter our GPU's 1.0 V core setting.

With core clock expectations between 900 and 950 MHz, I began stability testing at 880 MHz, bumping up the core in 10 MHz increments. Attempts to push beyond 900 MHz were punished with artifacts in DiRT 3’s game menus. Here's a helpful hint: if you aren't using DiRT 3, F1 2010, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, or Just Cause 2 for graphics stability testing, I highly recommend you add at least one of them. They have a tendency to demonstrate weaknesses in stability earlier than artifact scanners, synthetics, or other demanding titles like Metro 2033, Battlefield 3, or Crysis.

As I often do, I played it safe and quit overclocking the GDDR5 memory at 1125 MHz (4500 MT/s) before reaching the upper limits of stability. Our final testing frequencies were then dialed back to 891 MHz core and 1102.5 MHz (4410 MT/s) for the memory.

Test System Configuration And Benchmarks