Conclusion
Dan's Thoughts:
My time with the P8Z77-V was nothing short of flawless. From the unpacking to the final tests, everything was the model of stability and reliability. All integrated features simply worked as advertised with no problems to speak of. Despite being lower end on the totem pole with regard to features, I’d hardly call it stripped down though it’s pretty close to being considered as such in the feature rich P8Z77 series. Of course when reviewing boards in the P8Z77 lineup, I expect nothing short of excellence as I’ve seen many other boards in the series. As a result, any new entry into that line must at least reach parity with the others I’ve seen. And the P8Z77-V does exactly that.
The P8Z77-V has proven itself in my mind as a capable enthusiast board in every way that counts. Good layout, excellent stability, solid features, awesome fan control, capable software, and the best UEFI on the market.
At the time of this writing the P8Z77-V can be had for around $184.99 (1 year extended warranty included) at Newegg and $184.99 at Amazon with FREE with Super Saver Shipping . As such I’d consider it an incredible value if you are looking to build an LGA1155 system that has a strong feature set, including wireless networking, excellent overclocking, SLI and CrossFireX support, and more. If you are in the market for a sub-$185 motherboard, you simply can’t go wrong with the ASUS P8Z77-V.
Kyle's Thoughts:
Throughout my testing the ASUS P8Z77-V motherboard worked perfectly. The only time I saw any stability issues was when I pushed the processor too far when overclocking. OS installation and operation were perfect with the P8Z77-V.
I ran the ASUS P8Z77-V for 24 hours under our Torture Test running full CPU, RAM, and GPU loads with success. After that I put it in the incubator and the temperature climbed to a 42C ambient. I left it incubated running our Torture Test for 3 full days without issue. Surface temperatures of the PWM components were at 66C.
While ASUS has told us it will be making changes to the BIOS that will alert you of changes made that impact traditional Turbo scaling, these are not baked into this BIOS. A minor change, such as setting the memory clock to 1600MHz, will cause Turbo to scale to its maximum level and stay there no matter how many cores are loaded. Most enthusiasts probably do not mind this, but it would be nice to know these Turbo scaling changes are being made automatically and be able to turn these off should we want to. I personally think this is ASUS’ attempt to win motherboard benchmarks. Since ASUS has done this, we are now seeing Gigabyte do this as well and Gigabyte is now even scaling the BClk as well which impacts the processor frequency.
Overclocking the ASUS P8Z77-V was a fun time. ASUS’ automatic "OC Tuner" has come a long way since its inception, mainly it now actually works fairly well. After going into the BIOS, setting it to optimal defaults, I selected the OC Tuner option. It took the system 1 minute 31 seconds to get to a live desktop with its new overclock. It automatically overclocked the 3770K to 4.18GHz (41x102) with a 1360MHz memory clock with 9-9-9-24-2T timings.
Getting a 4.9GHz/1600MHz overclock out of the 3770K proved to be fairly easy, but getting it 100% stable proved elusive. Dan and I used two different CPUs. His was a retail purchased CPU and I used an Intel engineering sample. With a vCore of 1.275v and PLL at 1.9v, 4.8GHz was stable overnight. I spent all afternoon playing with the CPU and pushing the vCore to 1.4v gave me some fairly good stability at 4.9GHz, but after a number of hours the software would crash or BSOD the system.
The Bottom Line
The ASUS P8Z77-V proved to be a great motherboard. Its price point however does put it at somewhat of a premium, but if you can utilize the headline features there is no doubt that it will be of value at $185. If you can use the ASUS Wi-Fi GO! Feature, that alone is a valuable feature. While it packs a lot of features, it does not have it all, which is understandable. No eSATA, no FireWire (not that it probably matters to many anymore), and no virtualization support, or WHS and WS2008R2 drivers. A couple of these could me deal breakers, so we thought it important to mention those here.
While we have not reviewed it, the "LX" version of this motherboard looks very attractive at $140 with Free Super Saver Shipping at Amazon if you can do without some of the higher end features and lacking PCIe slots.
The ASUS P8Z77-V was feature rich, stable under duress, and well appointed for almost all enthusiasts’ needs. You can easily build a kick ass gaming rig with this motherboard.
