FRONTPAGE Biostar TZ77XE4 Motherboard Review

Overclockers.com · Apr 30, 2012

The TZ77XE4, it's new, it's shiny, it has bright orange heatsinks and lightning bolts on the box! Sounds like a good start to me.

The most obvious feature of this motherboard is the new Intel Z77 chipset and all it brings with it. Primarily that means full support for the Ivy Bridge Intel CPUs. Other highlights include full PCIe 3.0 support (though this does require an Ivy Bridge CPU), Lucid Virtu MVP and a pretty serious looking CPU power section.

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dejo · Apr 30, 2012

nice writeup. what was your 2600k capable of on other boards? I found going to cl9 gave me my regular oc or maybe even a bit more when on the asrock extreme6, with cl7 I was stuck 300mhz short of what was known capable

Bobnova · Apr 30, 2012

Other boards and that core voltage varies from 4.5GHz to 4848MHz.
Other boards with Lots of Volts it'll do 5100-5200 with all four cores and eight threads, or a bit over 5400 with two cores two threads.
Interestingly this board stomped all others in Maxxmem, despite a significantly lower CPU clock speed.
Stomped too, not just beat.

dejo · Apr 30, 2012

try those rams at cl9 and see if you gain any at max voltage. I sure did on the ext6

Brolloks · Apr 30, 2012

Are you going to add the IB results once you get your chips?

'Cuda340 · Apr 30, 2012

Nice review. :thup:

Looking forward to your take on the board with Ivy...... :popcorn:

Don Karnage · Apr 30, 2012

Bought this board on release and the NIC died a week later then the board died on me and refused to power. Gave Biostar a shot and it was a nice board while it worked

Bobnova · Apr 30, 2012

I figure I'll at least post IB results in this thread, yeah.
I don't know whether the article will get updated.

PolRoger · Apr 30, 2012

I'm running this board but I seem to be missing (or can't find) the LLC level setting you refered to in BIOS?? I only seem to have "enabled" and "disabled"?

Bobnova · Apr 30, 2012

Fairly certain it was on the OCing page.
I'll be dragging the board out again when my IB chips show up, I'll update then.
I may drag it out beforehand if I have a chance, I have a pretty gnarly review schedule right now though.

PolRoger · Apr 30, 2012

Well the only thing that I can find related to "CPU VCore LoadLine control" is labeled in the O.N.E menu as: CPU Vcore Loadline

My BIOS has just two options... "Disabled" or "Enabled" with enabled being the default setting. It would be great to have some of those LLC choices... with 25%, 50%, 75% etc.

My BIOS version is: Z77CF214.BST with a 2/14/2012 build date.

Don Karnage · Apr 30, 2012

PolRoger said:
Well the only thing that I can find related to "CPU VCore LoadLine control" is labeled in the O.N.E menu as: CPU Vcore Loadline

My BIOS has just two options... "Disabled" or "Enabled" with enabled being the default setting. It would be great to have some of those LLC choices... with 25%, 50%, 75% etc.

My BIOS version is: Z77CF214.BST with a 2/14/2012 build date.

214 is the release bios and horrible. Upgrade to 419

PolRoger · Apr 30, 2012

I've updated my BIOS and the new LLC options are there now! :thup:

Bobnova · Apr 30, 2012

This isn't the first Z77 motherboard with bios issues like that. The ASRock Z77 Pro I got for review came with a newer BIOS than is currently available. Kind of odd considering that the board was launched three weeks ago.
Glad you got it worked out!

Robert17 · May 2, 2012

Thanks for the review, well done. I'm looking forward to your IB update as well, was comparing this board with some other Z77s earlier.

PolRoger · May 2, 2012

One thing I've noticed about the BIOS for this board that I think Biostar should address is that there is no adjustment or even a display for PLL voltage??

Bobnova · May 2, 2012

That's something the extreme folks have run into, most of them have done hard mods for it.
Rumor has it that with a hardmod and LN2 and an IB the board flies.

Don Karnage · May 2, 2012

PolRoger said:
One thing I've noticed about the BIOS for this board that I think Biostar should address is that there is no adjustment or even a display for PLL voltage??

One of the things i hated about the bios. Its locked at 1.8v

Bobnova · May 17, 2012

Got a 3770k and stuffed it in there. Thing is quite happily folding proteins as we speak at 4.5GHz. MOSFET heatsinks are cool to the touch, they're effective heatsinks after all. No issues at all.
The POST LED shows the core temp even in Linux, something not true of some other Z77 boards.

Bobnova · May 26, 2012

Further followup:
With a 3770k there are no multiplier issues like there were with the 2600k. It's running at 4835MHz right now for testing. That's only two cores, four core mode it runs happily at 4700 and 1.4vcore.
The lack of PLL may be an issue for higher air OCing, so I've heard at least.
I'll likely be taking a soldering iron to it for benching use as I know it'll be an issue on LN2.

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