Intel DZ77GA-70K LGA 1155 Motherboard Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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Intel DZ77GA-70K LGA 1155 Motherboard Review - We'll be taking a look at one of Intel's motherboards today, specifically the Intel DZ77GA-70K which is part of its Extreme Motherboard series. How can you tell it's an extreme motherboard? Why it has a skull on it of course! All kidding aside there is more to the DZ77GA-70K than just marketing.
 
Against my better judgement I bought an Intel DZ68BC for my last build. Boy that was a mistake. Intel released a BIOS that totally ruined my board. I had to send it back and get a replacement. For 3 months they left the broken BIOS online. After 3 months they finally released a fix but it has the same damn problems. A few weeks later they released the "fix for the fix" BIOS and it still is full of problems. For the price of the hardware I'd never recommend anyone look at Intel boards.

If you look on their motherboard support forums all of the newer Z77 boards are being plagued by bad BIOS files too.
http://communities.intel.com/community/tech/desktop
 
Let me be the first in this thread to trash this exact board. I bought it when it was first released and had nothing but issues with it. For some reason this and a few other Intel boards do not work with Hauppauge PCI-E tuner cards. I have an HVR-2250 that this board would simply not recognize that it was even installed. There is a place in the BIOS where you can see what is in the slots and it simply says "Not Populated". The card works in any other board I have ever put it in.

There are also a lot of people who were having issues using UEFI for booting. I "thought" I had it working at one point, but when I went back to test it, I wasn't able to get it to work. Intel claims you need a >2TB hdd in order to use UEFI to boot. Clearly all of the laptops and OEM pcs that ship with UEFI enabled on 500GB hdds and any SSD drive would have to argue that point.

Tech support for Intel is also beyond useless. I called them up after RMAing the first board and finding the same issue on the second one. They played the blame game and said it had to be Hauppauge's fault. I asked if there was anyone else to talk to or esclate my issue with. I was told there wasn't anyone else.


If the card would have worked properly I would still be using the board as it wasn't too bad otherwise. Having a couple of PCI slots was important to me as most of my cards are legacy and having dual onboard gig nics was one of the main reasons for opting for this board. The onboard graphics actually worked better than it does on my new board as it allowed you to get up to 512MB of ram for usage.


I think Kyle did post something about this board not working for him a couple of months ago. If I'm mistaken it's definitely important to let everyone know that you made an attempt but wouldn't write your article because the product wasn't good enough. I played early adopter and definitely got bit by it, but hopefully anyone else looking to setup IVB steers clear of this setup. I'm using an MSI Z77A-GD43 board now and it's working better than the Intel board did.
 
Daniel mentioned that this boards' BIOS has a fast boot option... how did that affect POST times compared to other boards?

Ever since the X58 I've been sick of Intel boards taking longer to POST than to load the operating system, it would be a big help to me if reviewers would make some kind of note as to how long it takes for a board to go through the POST cycle.
 
Thank you for your work Kyle and Dan it was a good read. I did use this board when I build my current system with the Intel® Core™ i5-3570K back at launch and I liked this board a good deal.

Here is the link for the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility.
 
bman212121 said:
I think Kyle did post something about this board not working for him a couple of months ago. If I'm mistaken it's definitely important to let everyone know that you made an attempt but wouldn't write your article because the product wasn't good enough. I played early adopter and definitely got bit by it, but hopefully anyone else looking to setup IVB steers clear of this setup. I'm using an MSI Z77A-GD43 board now and it's working better than the Intel board did.
Click to expand...

I directly addressed this on the conclusion page.
 
IntelEnthusiast said:
Thank you for your work Kyle and Dan it was a good read. I did use this board when I build my current system with the Intel® Core™ i5-3570K back at launch and I liked this board a good deal.

Here is the link for the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility.
Click to expand...

We only cover the software included with the board, or available on the board's product download page. I know I could have grabbed that, but it's not really a relevant inclusion. I think it should be. No doubt about that. Intel should include that with their Extreme boards.
 
What about this ability of the Realtek codec to output 7.1 across HDMI?

I'd really like to hear more about that.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
What about this ability of the Realtek codec to output 7.1 across HDMI?

I'd really like to hear more about that.
Click to expand...

I didn't test that. Even if I had thought about it, I don't have anything that can accept it on the other side. Sure I've got TV's that will accept HDMI inputs, but no receiver to handle the 7.1 channel audio.
 
Dan_D said:
I didn't test that. Even if I had thought about it, I don't have anything that can accept it on the other side. Sure I've got TV's that will accept HDMI inputs, but no receiver to handle the 7.1 channel audio.
Click to expand...

You don't have a receiver? You're not a college kid living at home in the basement are you? (I kid, I kid...)
 
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