Hi,

I am looking for a Z77 motherboard. I have seen a lot of reviews anout this motherboard on different sites such as "Hardware Heaven", everywhere i see, it has better performance than Asus sabertooth or Intel d70 board. But in this site, it performed lesser than most of the other motherboards. Is it related to BIOS update?(I mean using older BIOS gives better performance). Can you give your thoughts on this.

Thanks,
Senthil

I tested the board using the latest BIOS and I have to say I've been quite disappointed about the performance. I think you'd have to compare testing methods. At ocaholic we use a fixed multiplyer and we deactivate all options related to turbo. We try to eleminate as many factors as possible so we can reliably determine the boards real performance.

Quite a few other websites test the boards with activated turbo. Imo this gives a weird impression, since motherboard manufacturers can select the turbo stages themselves, so they can kind of cheat ;-)
This is the reason why we use a fixed multiplyer. I think you'll also see that the results from from our tests show less deviation. This is also related to the fix multiplyer.

Okay, that clarified it. So, it is like overclocking the board automatically. Thank you for the immediate reply. A good review.

Nice test.

The slow mode is activated in the testing.
In Screen 23 is visible.

Therefore, the result is so bad.

Was OFF for the review, because ON clocks the CPU at 1'600 MHz