+1 for Gigabyte. My new Z77 board is working flawlessly...as have all my previous Gigabyte boards. Been using them forever.
i got this board! board looks beautiful, well a little better than asus ROG boards with about the same theme. i havent played with this board much, last night i was able to reach 4.6ghz stable with 1.35 vcore but my temps were trolling at 88-94C lol (HT on). i went back to 4.4 with 1.29V and now temps are like 82-87 in prime95. i am using zalman Cnps 9900Max-R (the red kind ) besides that i am able to choose xmp profile easily and my muskin red rams are running at 2133 mhz (manufacture specified speeds) without any problem. hope this will help
88-94C is a little toasty for the CPU, actually I believe above the thermal limits! I do realise the Ivy's are said to run hot. I was looking for a long time in getting a Silver Arrow CPU cooler, then the SB-E came out and that looked like a possible alternative. I came across a review for a new Silver Arrow (Silver Arrow Extreme, different to the SB-E) that had reddish coloured fans. Apparently it gave the Noctua NH-D14 a run for its money which I thought was quite impressive. When temperatures get up though its a lot noisier than the standard Silver Arrow. The issue I have though is availability, I seriously don't think it would be available here before July when I upgrade. I can't even find the normal Silver Arrow for sale here anymore... Good to hear about the board though, it settles my decision on the Extreme6
nice, for some reason out of no where asrock started building high quality boards lol. and yes, temps are high and the cooler im using cnps 9900max is a very reputable air cooler. 135mm fan lol. i was initially going to choose extreme6 but went for fatal1ty coz of color theme they should perform like same anyway. good luck.
Just got the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H here, it's pretty good, no issues here. I could easily go higher on the overclock on this thing... i just don't really need it right now so why stress it. But yeah i bet this thing could do wonders, the bios is ridiculously adjustable. I guess it all just depends on your preference as far as what manufacturer. Last build was a gigabyte and it was OC'd and rock solid. And i always liked their dual bios. The UD5H has a nice handy switch on the board so it's easy to just switch to the backup if you hose the bios somehow. EDIT: coming from my old AMD build, i felt like i might need an engineering degree to figure out everything in this thing's bios. After a while, you realize most things just don't even need to be touched, most things on auto and it's fine.
I think the issue these days is that manufacturers don't have proper documentation of what each option does. Many just literally skim it and not explain what each thing does. To make things worse, a lot of the options are labelled with very technical terms that anyone without a computer engineering in hardware degree would not understand. deltatux
Haha I was the same as I came from amd (with a cheap mobo) and didn't have a clue what a lot of the stuff did. I spent the day reading the net trying to figure it all out. I chose the Asus P8z77-v pro and love it. What does lucidlogix do and does it actually improve gaming performance? I couldn't get the hd4000 to work with amd6950 as I get an error- "This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12) If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system." Any help would be appreciated
I just picked up an ASRock Z77 Pro 4 and an i5-3570K at MicroCenter for $260. They have some deals with certain mobos where if you buy an i5-3570K the mobo price drops like 40%. $190 for the cpu, $70 for the Pro 4. probably won't get around to putting it all together till next week, gotta back up a ton of stuff. Hadn't really planned on this upgrade but got a hefty retroactive raise so decided for once to splurge and go close to the top of new tech. An i7 would have been overkill for me. Got a Gigabyte GTX-670 last week. This setup should hold me for a couple years. Sam
