Name: P8Z77-V Pro
Brand: Asus

TechRadar Verdict

An excellent all-round board that's only really let down by a lack of USB connectivity out the box.

Pros

+
Great price
+
Excellent comparative performance
+
Same awesome BIOS

Cons

-
Limited USB connectivity out of the box

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Introduction and benchmarks

Of all the Z68 boards that stalked through our labs in the last generation the Asus P8Z68-V Pro was one of our all-time favourites. This Asus P8Z77-V Pro update promises much in the same vein of price/performance metrics and with a serious feature set to boot.

This Z77 flavour of Asus' special Intel sauce is another well laid out slice of black and blue styling with more than enough features to cater for all but the very enthusiastic enthusiasts.

Vital stats

Socket

- Intel LGA 1155

Chipset

- Intel Z77

Graphics support

- 2x PCIe 3.0 x16, 1x PCIe 2.0 x16, Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFireX

Memory

- Dual channel DDR3

High speed interfaces

- 8x USB 3.0, 4x SATA 6Gbps

Benchmarks

It's a close run thing between the Asus and Gigabyte boards, but at stock speeds the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H has the edge, if only by a hair's breadth.

Thanks to the higher default Turbo we experience with these boards it pushed them ahead of the other competing Z77s.

When it came to the overclocking though Asus took back its crown, shading the Gigabyte board in Cinebench with scores of 9.69 vs. 9.65. As we say, shading.

But when you think the top-end desktop chip, the hexcore Intel Core i7 3960X hits 10.54, the Asus board with the Ivy Bridge CPU getting within 0.85 of a mark is impressive for a quad-core.