ASUS P8Z77-V Pro Reviews

The ASUS P8Z77-V comes with numerous accessories, has a user-friendly PCB design and offers a lot of capabilities. Its advanced digital power system SMART Digi+, working together with the Dual Intelligent Processors 3 technology, provides flexible voltage regulation options, which is important for good overclocking. The mainboard allows using a CPU-integrated graphics core but you can also run one or several discrete graphics cards, combining them in AMD CrossFireX or NVIDIA SLI configurations. The P8Z77-V features additional SATA 6 Gbit/s and USB 3.0 controllers. It has handy Q-DIMM and Q-Slot connectors, Q-LED indicators, MemOK! and USB BIOS Flashback technologies. Its capabilities would have made it a flagship product just a few years ago, but now you can get all this with a basic mainboard, which the least advanced of ASUS’s top-end Z77-based offers. It is also the first time we see such a humble product support wireless technologies. Thus, the P8Z77-V is going to make an optimal choice for many categories of users. Choosing the junior model from among top-end offers often makes sense not only with mainboards but also with CPUs and graphics cards. The opposite approach can work, too: take the most advanced of entry-level products and you get about the same range capabilities. We’ll talk about one such mainboard in our upcoming review.

The ASUS P8Z77-V proved to be a great motherboard. Its price point however does put it at somewhat of a premium, but if you can utilize the headline features there is no doubt that it will be of value at $185. If you can use the ASUS Wi-Fi GO! Feature, that alone is a valuable feature. While it packs a lot of features, it does not have it all, which is understandable. No eSATA, no FireWire (not that it probably matters to many anymore), and no virtualization support, or WHS and WS2008R2 drivers. A couple of these could me deal breakers, so we thought it important to mention those here.

As with other Z77 motherboards, there's really no compelling reason to upgrade if you're already using a Z68 rig. But if you're building a new system from scratch, and don't want to spend much more money for an X79 Express-based system, Z77 is definitely the way to go, and the ASUS P8Z77-V for $179.99 would make an excellent foundation for it.

After spending a week with the ASUS P8Z77-V, it became very clear to me who ASUS intended this board to be used by, namely those that already own a Sandy Bridge CPU, or those that want to run dual VGAs as well as an external add-on RAID card, or similar devices. The PCIe slot configuration sums it all up nicely, and while it may be a bit disheartening that you cannot use all the expansion slots to their fullest at the same time, it's really understandable why things are arranged as they are. The idle power consumption is quite simply amazing, so low that I recalibrated by meter to make sure the readings were correct, as that was something I really did not expect. When it comes to overclocked performance, the ASUS P8Z77-V does admirably as well, and it is one of just a few Intel Z77 Express-based products I've tested so far that scaled properly in F1 2010 during the overclocking tests. Although it's not an ROG product, and not the top performer overall, it does provide a lot given its small cost, and the addition of the Wi-Fi GO! card just makes it all that much better. I was a bit disappointed by the lack of an mSATA port to be used with Intel's Smart Response and Rapid Start techologies, but at the same time it does seem to be the perfect Intel Z77 Express match for Sandy Bridge CPUs. Yes, you can get more from Intel's Z77 Express chipset, but it IS going to cost you more too. Don't forget to hit us up in the forums, and tell us what YOU think!