ASUS P8Z77 WS Pro Reviews

We would like to take this opportunity to give our friends at ASUS a hearty “Thank you” for allowing us to review the P8Z77 WS motherboard. At stock operational speeds, the board was a performance powerhouse, easily running with whatever was thrown its way. Couple that performance with the board’s ability to support 4-way NVIDIA SLI or AMD CrossFire and you have the potential for a gaming super-board. Add the gravy of ASUS’ superior implementation of their UEFI BIOS and you have a winner on your hands. However, the board did have some potential pitfalls that I ran straight into. The board fell short in the overclocking department. It wanted to go fast, but getting it to manually stabilize became a test of my abilities and patience. I was disappointed that TurboV Auto Tune did not cooperate also after hearing about the successes other PC Perspective reviewers have had with it.

The performance delivered by the P8Z77 WS is within the expectations based on the installed hardware. That being said the ease with which you can improve the board's performance is as simple as point and click. Manually tuning or using ASUS TurboV Evo tool you can overclock on this board as easy as any in the ASUS P8Z77 arsenal. By using TurboV EVO in AI Suite II the board and software set up a perfectly stable 4.42GHz speed on my clock speed challenged Core i7 3770K. Manual tuning was a bit more rewarding as it usually is at 4.6GHz. While I had the opportunity I even dropped in a couple different sets of DRAM to see just what kind of capability this board had without the specialized tuning options available on the Maximus V Gene. True to form from ASUS I was able to match what the M5G would deliver in terms of memory speeds of up to 2666MHz. Even if you get out of bounds when pushing the limits ASUS overclocking recovery is a thing of beauty. Worst case so far was a complete power down to allow for a successful post and boot back into the BIOS, with all of your settings intact.

Workstation products usually have a sturdy construction and extreme stability, but lack the flexibility and overclocking headroom of enthusiast products. ASUS has breathed a breath of fresh air into the normal humdrum workstation, breaking the trend of “set it and forget it” WS products. The WS series from ASUS can be clocked, tweaked, and adjusted to match your every need (XEON chips cannot be overclocked much). The P8Z77 WS is a content professional’s, dream as it is a server class board with server class compatibility, but without the server class limitations. The BIOS on the WS board is practically built for tweaking. In addition to the workstation market, this board could also be a great gamer’s board, mostly because of the 4 way SLI compatibility, amazing overclock capability, and server like reliability. We really feel that any gamer who wants more than 3 GPU’s together, and is looking to push the limits on a Ivy Bridge system could choose this board without a doubt. The worst things we could say about this board are that it looks a tad bland (not that we really care much), and that it is on the expensive side for a Z77 board.

This ASUS P8Z77 WS is pretty much the most expensive LGA1155 motherboard on the market. If you already are thinking of buying a P8Z77 WS motherboard, you likely already have a specific WS feature set in mind. The WS still rules the school when it comes to IO connectability and PCIe lanes using a desktop processor. The P8Z77 WS showed us the durability and stability we thought it should while delivering some very solid overclocking. There are some caveats with using the board to it full connective abilities, and we did have some stability issues with our first sample. Given these issues, it is hard to turn your nose up to what it can deliver.

The motherboard is truly the backbone of your system and making the buying decision can be a daunting task if you are a very picky person, and sometimes you can even outthink the entire process and freeze yourself up with dilemma trying to wrap your brain around your needs versus your cash flow. This motherboard we write about today is a powerhouse of a product and geared for those who use their motherboard for many different applications, but still want the best in gaming qualities. The entire ASUS channel stack has so many basic features that the P8Z77 lineup is solid all the way from the entry level P8Z77-V to the P8Z77 Premium that where your needs fit in can be a bit confusing. All the boards have the same overclocking abilities and BIOS options for that aspect of your needs so no need to differentiate the boards for that reason.