Should i get a z77 motherboard

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Lost your password? At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Gigabyte told us it plans to offer a more cohesive collection of tweaking utilities with its motherboards. Motherboards makers often slap a couple of stickers onto their boards to highlight specific features or attributes. MSI takes that to the extreme with the Z77A-GD65, which is covered by three massive stickers and a couple of smaller ones. Presumably, a sale has already been made. However, a number of them left behind sticky residue that needed to be scraped off with a fingernail.

Remove the stickers, and the Z77A-GD65 looks like a typical enthusiast board, right down to the black-and-blue color scheme. Perhaps digital camo would be more fitting today. The board has digital power circuitry, too. MSI could even go with an arctic-camo theme to match the growing number of white enclosures trickling onto the market. The VRMs are covered by a pair of stylish heatsinks linked by a single pipe.

Amazingly, this is the only board of the three to feature a heatpipe. MSI used to run networks of the things across its motherboards, complete with rollercoaster-style loops. People used to wear acid-wash jeans, too. With a Sandy Bridge processor, your options are limited to 16 lanes to the first slot or 8 lanes each to the first two. Peripheral controllers get around. The Z77A-GD65 gets by with the four ports built into the Z77 Express; two are routed to the rear cluster, while the others are accessible via front-panel headers.

The GD65 is the only board of the three without a DisplayPort video output. The interface is devoid of sliders and flashy effects, and it and operates more like the advanced modes available on the other two boards.

I quite like the layout, and the mouse tracking feels much smoother than on the Gigabyte board. It does take a little time to get used to having to double-click on everything, though. At least the mouse wheel works for scrolling. The overclocking options provided in the firmware are numerous.

Intelligent speed control is limited to the CPU fan, for which the user can set only a target temperature. The Control Center software that ships with the Z77A-GD65 fails to expand on the fan controls, although it does offer a host of overclocking settings. Unfortunately, it takes forever to load and apply changes, which can require a reboot. Congratulations for making it this far already. Unless you like seeing firmware options, board specifications, and system configurations laid out in painstaking detail, you might want to skip ahead to the beginning of our performance results.

Curious how the three boards stack up in the most important firmware categories? Min, max duty cycle CPU: slope. System slope CPU: Target temp. For most folks, all the boards have sufficient clock, multiplier, and voltage headroom for overclocking. A Z68 motherboard has been included for comparison, but time constraints prevented us from testing additional platforms. We used the following system setups for testing. With few exceptions, all tests were run at least three times, and we reported the median of the scores produced.

RST: Thanks to each of the motherboard makers for supplying their boards, too, and to Intel for providing the CPUs. Vertical refresh sync vsync was disabled for all tests. All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible.

If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them. The solid-state drive is probably faster than what most folks will be plugging into their USB ports, and the docking station supports USAP. The two actually look quite good together. First up is CrystalDiskMark, which will give us a sense of the how the USB controllers perform in a handful of key metrics.

The Samsung SSD was secure erased before each batch of tests on each board to ensure consistent results. It pushes higher sequential read and write speeds than the competition and has a substantial lead over its next-closest rival in the read test. Using xcopy produces nearly identical copy speeds to dragging and dropping files using the Windows GUI, so our results should be representative of typical real-world performance.

The Intel controller reads the files from both sets much faster than the others. It produced inconsistent results when copying the mixed file set from our USB drive. In these tests, the Z77 again looks very fast. We are using slightly different driver revisions for the two platforms, so keep that in mind as we move through our test results.

We went through the same secure-erase routines and used the same benchmark settings. Looks like the same controller logic to me. Our FileBench results offer a little more variety, although the two platforms remain closely matched. The Z77 is a little bit faster when reading our movie files and writing our mixed set. However, its predecessor pulls ahead when reading the mixed set and writing the movies. DriveBench simulates disk-intensive multitasking scenarios by playing back traces of real-world disk activity.

You can read more about DriveBench here. Not really. All the boards are running the same CPU and graphics card, and those components are more important limiting factors for application performance. We measured system power consumption, sans monitor and speakers, at the wall outlet using a Watts Up Pro power meter. Readings were taken at idle and under a load consisting of a Cinebench Most of the motherboards have additional power-saving features that can be controlled via their firmware.

The names of these power-saving schemes are all different, of course, but they attempt to achieve the same thing: lowering power consumption without restricting performance. Each board was run with its power-saving features disabled and enabled, with the latter config detailed in parenthesis.

The field spreads out a bit under load, but the MSI remains one of the most power-efficient options. Only the Asus board has lower power consumption under load, and then only when its EPU mojo is enabled. Overclocking is a different story, however. CPU-Z reported a 1. Should I get a B75 or Z77 motherboard?

Forums Hardware Motherboards. JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. Previous Next Sort by votes. Denis54 Distinguished. Nov 25, 68 0 18, 0. I want to upgrade my computer from my old C2D. I am retired and I use my computer 2 - 4 hours a day to surf the web, read emails and do some simple Word and Excel work.

Should I get a B75 or a Z77 motherboard? My priorities are stability and reliability. I do not plan to overclock. CPU will be an i Best Offers for towel rack mirror surface brands and get free shipping. Best Offers for waterproof arduino sensor brands and get free shipping. Best Offers sx4 storage box brands and get free shipping. Best Offers yellow bottle cages brands and get free shipping.