Although the Intel Z77 Express chipset has been available for a while now we chose to wait until the official launch of Ivy Bridge to begin our reviews. After all the Z77 with Panther Point was designed to get the best performance when tied with Ivy Bridge so why not show that off first. To kick off our coverage of the Z77 we deiced to try out Intel’s reference design in the DZ77GA-70K. This performance desktop board from Intel is a great starting point and will give us the feel of how Intel meant things to work. So let’s get to it shall we?
BIOS - BIOS is an acronym that stands for Basic Input/Output System. It is meant to control your product at a very low level. As of right now there are three regularly used BIOS formats (there are actually more than that but there are three common ones). These are the AMI (American Megatrends Incorporated), Award, and Phoenix. Intel has improved on their UEFI concept with what they are calling the Visual BIOS. This is something to see in action as it is possibly the smoothest BIOS we have used in a very long time. Check out our video of the BIOS below.
Overclocking – As we covered in our full review of the Core i7 3770K overclocking with Ivy Bride as your CPU has its limitations and difficulties. Although the new Core i7 CPUs are 22nm and have a higher TJMax (thermal junction maximum not the retail store) you still have to worry about leakage at the transistor gates. The higher the frequency (and voltage applied) the more likely this is to happen. There is a bright side to this though. With the new 22nm process the cold bug is gone, this means that you can push Ivy Bridge pretty high (the record is something like 6.6GHz as of this writing 4-19), but you have to make sure things are cool to help maintain stability. Our maximum overclock was 4.8GHz at 1.339 Volts anything over that was unstable and would not complete our test run. You can see our CPUz screen shot below, but we did not validate it at the time it was run due to NDA restrictions. Of course overclocking is a picky subject. I can buy to identical CPUs from the store and they will not always perform the same way under stress. This is the same with motherboards, RAM and GPUs. So again it is important to keep in mind that our results represent a specific hardware configuration. Yours may be similar but will rarely be identical. Overclocking Tools - Intel has their own overclocking tool (as you might imagine) which is very functional and actually very clean looking. When we first opened up the Extreme Tuning Utility we were a little surprised at how simple it looked, but how much control you actually have. You even have tools to monitor what your system is doing. There are tools for overclocking the CPU the memory and the GPU in addition to a page just for the CPU. Intel has also thrown in their very own stress test for the GPU and CPU to make sure everything is happy.
