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?
Value - Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. At $239.99 from most online stores the DZ77GA-70K might seem a little pricey. In a way it is sort of pricey, but you are getting a fair amount of product for that money. You are not only getting PCIe 3.0 support, but support for the new 22nm Intel CPUs and more. In the end it is not a bad deal, but you might want to look at some of the other Z77 boards depending on what you want to do with your new Core i7 Ivy Bridge CPU.
Conclusion - We have always liked Intel motherboards for their stability and actual quality. If you are buying Intel then you know you are going to be able to use all of the features that come with Intel products without any issues. There are better performing boards out there, but in the end if you want to see how an Intel CPU is supposed to perform you can always look to the level of performance you get from their desktop boards and see. That having been said we did like the DZ77GA-70K for the features and performance we saw (especially running compute functions on the GMA 4000). The Visual BIOS is very slick and clean. There are a few companies that I know of that should take a look at this new BIOS and see how it is done. All that aside this is not a board for everyone. You are not going to get amazing overclocks out of it and while it can game there are things that need improving before we would call it a gamer’s board. Still we can see how the Z77 chipset should run and we will use this as our baseline in our continued coverage of both Ivy Bridge and the Z77 chipset.
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