Verdict and Conclusion
ASRock’s Z77 Professional is aimed squarely at the top end gaming market. I’m assuming Professional is refering to professional gaming rather than office work.
I hope so at least, as I don’t see many of these futures being used for word processing!
The board layout is pretty good, the PCIe latch on the top spot is quite hard for me to get to with a GPU installed. The heatsink that interfears could be an inch shorter, which would fix this problem.
Looks wise the board is quite nice, the heatsinks are stylish while still being very effective. I’m quite pleased to see this, heatsinks should be built primarily to get rid of heat with looks as a secondard goal. ASRock apparantly agrees.
I’m very impressed with the overclocking abilities of the Z77 Professional, it does far better than any other LGA1155 motherboard I have used. The location of the CPU power plug and USB3 header are dubious for some installs (like mine), but would probably be good for others.
The full software suite that comes on the DVD is, in a word, terrible. Malwaresque game links do not please me one bit. The F-Stream Tuner software is excellent however, it’s the best windows overclocking program I’ve used.
The box and website have some excessive marketing claims, it’s to be expected on a new platform and top end board, but still annoying.
The UEFI BIOS layout is quite good, I like it. I like that the board has both IDE and Floppy ports, bizare as it might be to find them on a Z77 board.
POST code LEDs make me happy, as do power/reset/clear cmos buttons being on the board.
All told there are some solid pros:
- Excellent overclocking abilities and options.
- Nice effective heatsinks.
- Great UEFI BIOS layout.
- Tons of USB3 and USB2 ports.
- Tons of SATA ports.
- Floppy and IDE/PATA ports.
POST code LED and power/reset/clear cmos buttons.
There are some cons, too:
- PCIe slot latch is difficult for large fingers to access.
- Driver/Utility DVD includes a difficult (impossible?) to remove Xynga link.
- CPU power plug and USB3 plug could be located more conveniently.
When it comes down the bottom line I am quite impressed by the ASRock Z77 Professional motherboard and give it a 9/10 score.
