ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1155 by stefan @ 2012-05-21

The latest Fatal1ty Z77 Professional board from ASRock does not disappoint regarding overall performance and continues to sport the same catchy black/red theme, along with a redesigned UEFI interface, plenty of connectivity ports and software for enhancing and fine-tuning performance from inside Windows OS.

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The Board BIOS Part I

The UEFi interface of the Fatal1ty series has been reworked, so now we have a much better looking GUI; the menus are split into multiple sections like Main, OC Tweaker, Advanced and so on. Inside the Main menu displays information regarding the currently installed UEFI version, the installed CPU and its frequency, microcode, cache, total installed memory. Here we also have some new options: System Browser which displays a photo of the motherboard and shows which hardware has been installed in the available slots and OMG allows us to restrict the Internet access for users during some hour intervals:

 

 

 

The OC Tweaker menu is the most interesting because here we can fine-tune the system performance; for people that do not want to spend a lot of time working with different settings, ASRock has available some pre-optimized values for overclocking. Here we will be also able to adjust the CPU Ratio, the BCLK, enable or disable Intel SpeedStep and Turbo Boost. For avoiding certain throttling issues, we are also able to modify the power limits:

 

 

 

Further down, we have the XMP detected values of the installed memory modules which we can load right away, or we can go to the manual route and work with the timings inside the DRAM Configuration menu. The system voltages can be also adjusted here:

 

 

 

The last part of the OC Tweaker menu allows us to save the modifications in three different slots:

 

 

 

The DRAM Configuration menu allows us to change manually the memory timings; the settings we do not want to alter can be left on Auto setting:

 

 

 

 

The Advanced menu has multiple sub-sections like CPU-Configuration, North Bridge Configuration and so on; here we will be also able to execute the Instant Flash utility or Internet Flash (which will only work if we have an active connection available):

 

 

 

Inside the CPU Configuration sub-menu, we are allowed to select how many cores we want active, enable/disable processor states, Thermal Throttling or Intel Virtualization:

 

 

 

The North Bridge section lets us select the Primary Graphics Adapter, the PCI-E 2,4 link speeds; in the same menu we will be able to enable or disable other features like IGPU Multi-Monitor, Render Standby or Deep Render Standby:

 

 

 

The South Bridge section lets us enable/disable controllers concerning Audio, LAN, Firewire or IDE:

 

 

 

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