ASUS P8Z77-V Pro Intel Z77 Motherboard Review

Overclocking
Aside from the software overclocking tool TurboV EVO, ASUS of course still retains the ability to overclock in the BIOS. I, and many others, prefer to use this method as traditionally you retain a greater level of control over your overclock. TurboV EVO is definitely fully featured and is the closest I’ve seen to emulating BIOS settings at a software level, but it’s not quite as good; for me, at least. That’s to be expected.

Knowing the capabilities of my chip, I decided to attempt to boot right to 4.5Ghz with a +0.050v offset. I booted to Windows fine and was stable after a quick stability run.

I wanted to see how high I could get the clock on my processor before hitting either the thermal or voltage maximum, and was able to hit 4.8ghz with an offset of +0.230v. Due to the limitations of my CPU cooler, I was unable to benchmark at this setting due to heat exceeding 95 C, however after a quick stress run it was stable at first glance.

On previous tests, I have been unable to secure a 4.6Ghz clock that didn’t require a substantial voltage increase for stability. I was able to obtain 4.6Ghz via two methods; once by increasing BCLK to 103 on a x45 multiplier (4635 Mhz), and once with an x46 multiplier on a 100 Mhz BCLK.

I opted for the latter option for our testing due to the fact that changing BCLK also overclocks your RAM and PCI-E lanes, which resulted in POST issues when trying to also overclock the RAM.

To overclock RAM, typically you increase frequency (and voltage, depending on how high you’re going), and reducing timings if required. The Samsung RAM we’re testing with has stock timings of 11-11-11-28-1 at 1.35v, and in previous tests has been able to hit 2400 Mhz with timings of 10-12-11-28-2 at 1.6v. I was unable to get the system to POST at 2400 Mhz no matter what voltage I threw at it, which was a little disappointing, but I did manage to get 2133 Mhz stable at 10-12-11-28-2 at 1.55v, which is still a great RAM overclock and nothing to be sniffed at.

validator

cpuz

4.6 Ghz is a 1.2 Ghz (35%) overclock, which is great for a 24/7 overclock. As previously mentioned, we also managed to boot at 4.8Ghz, which is a 1.4 Ghz (41%) overclock – very impressive, and if heat weren’t an issue for my current hardware I’m sure we’d have been successful in benchmarking at this clock speed.