Intel DZ77RE-75K Pro Reviews

I have to say that as we were getting more and more acquainted with the new Intel DZ77RE-75K and Intel DZ77GA-70K mainboards, our opinion about them changed dramatically. At first their layout seemed flawless, but later on some issues convinced us otherwise. The developers obviously had their own idea of the best spot for the internal USB 3.0 connector, which was different from the others’ and proved to be somewhat flawed after all. The new “Visual BIOS” charmed us at first glance by being much easier to work with and much better-looking with way richer functionality. The option that allows you to select a BIOS section as a Home page was only available by Biostar mainboards before, and none of the makers have so far come up with the idea of adding a Search option to the BIOS. Among its other indisputable advantages are exceptionally rich functionality of the “Home” section and super-easy overclocking using “Overclocking Assistant”. However, later on we discovered that the new Visual BIOS hasn’t been restructured as much as it seemed at first sight: it retained some of the old issues and acquired numerous new ones, unfortunately. Of course, introduction of the new Visual BIOS could not be completely issue-free, and they will be fixed and eliminated with the time. But what really bothers me is whether anyone will ever get to eliminating the old ongoing problems that have existed in the old BIOS versions, too. Despite a number of shortcomings, we can’t consider these mainboards a failure. They have very rich functionality meeting all today’s needs, they work great in default mode and even overclock processors. It is great to see the top model in the lineup to boast new Thunderbolt interface, and the more systems supporting it will come out, the bigger will the infrastructure grow. Overall, Intel DZ77RE-75K and Intel DZ77GA-70K mainboards are quite interesting, but unfortunately, we can’t give them our ultimate recommendation just yet.

The performance of the board wasn't stellar either, lagging behind other boards - especially in the memory bandwidth stakes. In the end, the DZ77RE-75K's standard features and performance mean it ends up relying on Thunderbolt to stand out from the crowd. This early in Thunderbolt's life, unfortunately, that's just not enough.