ASRock Z77 Extreme4 LGA 1155 Motherboard Review @ [H]

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ASRock Z77 Extreme4 LGA 1155 Motherboard Review - While ASRock is a well known new comer in the motherboard market, we’ve not exactly been fans of ASRock products based on past experiences. ASRock’s popularity grows and as a result we are taking another look at a motherboard from in the hope of understanding this popularity. Is it just price, or is there more to ASRock’s offerings?
 
Boy would this board make me nervous installing a heavy air cooler,not too mention pushing down while putting ram and video card in. Not that I ever buy budget motherboards for myself but someone who doesn't have a lot of experience might run into trouble with this board. Great review as usual.
 
Kinda torn about the "thinness Issue" Much like Cars today compared to 30 years ago, if we a perception issue that the non-heavy feeling Auto were simply going to fall apart or "cheap" Non days it is the standard and generally accepted that with engineering, they are better quality and safer.

Could the thinness of this board contribute to better heat dissipation? I know we are all used to thick PCB that just feel more structured, however with everything now days being engineered for smaller, thinner, more "green" could this merely be an evolution of circuit board design?
 
I'm kind of surprised by the somewhat negative review here (I might be somewhat biased just having built a system with this particular board). I personally had none of those problems, and [H]ardocp was the only site I could find that gave this board a negative review.

That being said, I suppose if you are used to higher end boards, this might seem like a "budget" board to some. Personally I've had zero problems with it, and it was one of the easiest installs I've ever hard.
 
My biggest gripe with the board is it's width, the last stand off screw hole is slightly to the left of the first ram slot leaving about two inches of this very thin board totally unsupported. putting in the 24 pin psu plug and ram made me a bit uneasy about breaking the board.

I have this board at 4.6, 1.22v 24/7 folding for team 33 when I'm not gaming, zero problems.
The $40 dollar discount with a cpu deal at micro center was unbeatable
 
My biggest gripe with the board is it's width, the last stand off screw hole is slightly to the left of the first ram slot leaving about two inches of this very thin board totally unsupported. putting in the 24 pin psu plug and ram made me a bit uneasy about breaking the board.
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Actually, I guess I did have that problem as well, I just didn't really consider it all that big of a deal for the system I was building ;).
 
Negative review?
I thought it was a very fair review, in fact, I thought it was quite positive. It highlighted both good and bad things about the board, just like any other board review I've read here at the [H].

I could even say that this review helped me decide to add this board to the list of boards I will recommend for purchase to people on a budget.


thewooster said:
I'm kind of surprised by the somewhat negative review here (I might be somewhat biased just having built a system with this particular board). I personally had none of those problems, and [H]ardocp was the only site I could find that gave this board a negative review...
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Is the thin PCB a new thing from Asrock? I dont remember any of my Asrock boards being that thin/flimsy.
I am glad that they got some good credit because I do love their MB's and have worked great for me in both stock and OC situations.

I dont need to say it but will, awesome review!
 
I installed three of these MB's and I can agree that the PCB was pretty thin and was afraid of putting too much pressure but overall for the price had a lot of "extra" features you would not normally see for the $135 price tag or down to $105-$115 on sale.
 
I'm a pretty big ASRock fan and have had nothing but good performance out of the ones I've used. Wish they'd perform a little better in these reviews though.
 
Interesting write-up. I'm in the market for two boards to replace a couple of aging computers in the house. Looks like I'll be passing this one up. It may have survived 4 days of extreme temperatures in your tests, but would it survive two or three years since we don't upgrade that often? I'd rather not take any chances.

I'm also a current ASRock owner in my new media server running a Llano A4 3300 on an ASRock A75 Extreme6 FM1 A75, chosen because it has eight SATA ports. Not bad for $95 bucks. It performs perfectly as a Windows 2011 Home Server media server sporting six 2TB drives. I'd imagine the Z77 Extreme4 will perform just as great as home and gaming computers, but I hesitate on the heat issues. I've had my fill of heat issues as it is on one of the computers we have.
 
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Azhar said:
Interesting write-up. I'm in the market for two boards to replace a couple of aging computers in the house. Looks like I'll be passing this one up. It may have survived 4 days of extreme temperatures in your tests, but would it survive two or three years since we don't upgrade that often? I'd rather not take any chances.
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I dont know about you, but I keep my computer very cool with extra fans, aftermarket HS's, etc.
It passed the tests just like the more expensive mb's, so if you go with another manufacturer, you have the same problem. Maybe change the TIM?

The only bad was the thin pcb AFAIK.
 
Hagrid said:
Is the thin PCB a new thing from Asrock? I dont remember any of my Asrock boards being that thin/flimsy.
I am glad that they got some good credit because I do love their MB's and have worked great for me in both stock and OC situations.

I dont need to say it but will, awesome review!
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I bought 3 ASRock motherboards to test. The two less expensive boards were built with these flimsy PCBs. The third, a bit over a hundred dollars more, had a very stable PCB that we would normally equate with "enthusiast" hardware. You get what you pay for....
 
Funny, I checked this site last week before buying this exact board from Newegg Open Box for $80. I wanted to see how HardOCP reviewed it but had to read elsewhere. Everything I read about the board basically stated it was a great board for the cost of $135 and getting it at $80 made it an even better buy. It opened up some cash for me to pick up an i7 3770k instead of the none-K or get stuck with an i5 cpu.

The sound quality from the board for me is much better than the Creative sound card I had purchased 2 years ago. The board did not feel quite that flimsy to me but I also don't build computers every day like I used to. I however had zero problems with installing my Arctic Freezer 13 or fitting the board to my case. It booted up and worked from the start and the board layout is pretty decent.

I figure you can spend $250-$350 on a premium board and maybe get some fancier heatsinks and maybe a 1394 header with similar performance or you could save yourself some serious cash by grabbing a great board like this and freeing up the money for a much better CPU or video card.

In my opinion, the board considering it's price and performance deserved at least a "silver" award.

Edit: Let me add that I read no reference in your review of the high quality capacitors on this board. Mine are gold capped. Maybe I missed that part of the review being at work and having people interrupt my very important reading of HardOCP during lunch.
 
Hagrid said:
I dont know about you, but I keep my computer very cool with extra fans, aftermarket HS's, etc.
It passed the tests just like the more expensive mb's, so if you go with another manufacturer, you have the same problem. Maybe change the TIM?

The only bad was the thin pcb AFAIK.
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Well I think it's a combination of both high temps and thinness that makes it bad. If you have a hot board to begin with and the warped surface causes heatsink surface not to mate flush with the CPU heatspreader, you're going to have long term heat damage on the CPU.

Maybe I'm too worried about something that's not that noticeable? As I said, I have an older computer here that randomly shuts off at high performance tasks (Age of Empire Online, and Handbrake MKV encoding), and I simply don't want to deal with another overheating computer.

Yes I've changed heatsink and fan and paste on my aging Phenom II 720, but the damage was done. It's not the video card either since that's been changed a couple times.
 
Azhar said:
Well I think it's a combination of both high temps and thinness that makes it bad. If you have a hot board to begin with and the warped surface causes heatsink surface not to mate flush with the CPU heatspreader, you're going to have long term heat damage on the CPU.

Maybe I'm too worried about something that's not that noticeable? As I said, I have an older computer here that randomly shuts off at high performance tasks (Age of Empire Online, and Handbrake MKV encoding), and I simply don't want to deal with another overheating computer.

Yes I've changed heatsink and fan and paste on my aging Phenom II 720, but the damage was done. It's not the video card either since that's been changed a couple times.
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Yeah, I didnt notice it on my 970 extreme3, extreme3 gen3, and 1 other Asrock MB I have(5 total). Like I said, I have good cases and airflow and have not had to RMA any of them so far. But you have to buy what makes you feel safe so really cant go wrong with another brand.
 
thewooster said:
I'm kind of surprised by the somewhat negative review here (I might be somewhat biased just having built a system with this particular board). I personally had none of those problems, and [H]ardocp was the only site I could find that gave this board a negative review.

That being said, I suppose if you are used to higher end boards, this might seem like a "budget" board to some. Personally I've had zero problems with it, and it was one of the easiest installs I've ever hard.
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It is a budget board. The price of it and the feature set is in line with that. Granted it has features found on a board at a slightly more expensive price point, but nothing like the P8Z77-WS or Gigabyte Z77X-UP7. The only problem we had was with the PCB being super thin and thus more fragile than it should be. It warps badly enough to make mating the cooling hardware to the CPU something you have to watch. I had taken my test rig down after I finished the article and I can confirm the same thing Kyle saw.

And we've seen other budget offerings from other companies that do not have paper thin PCB's. The MSI Z77A-GD41 comes to mind. Though that board wasn't as good as the Z77 Extreme4 is by any means.

Like I said in the article, it's what ASRock has to do to bring this type of feature set to this price point.

Hagrid said:
Is the thin PCB a new thing from Asrock? I dont remember any of my Asrock boards being that thin/flimsy.
I am glad that they got some good credit because I do love their MB's and have worked great for me in both stock and OC situations.

I dont need to say it but will, awesome review!
Click to expand...

This is not new. All the ASRock PCB's I've seen have been relatively thin compared to those used by ASUS, Gigabyte or MSI.

MacLeod said:
I'm a pretty big ASRock fan and have had nothing but good performance out of the ones I've used. Wish they'd perform a little better in these reviews though.
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Actually the ASRock X79 Extreme4 got a positive review and our follow up to that article was positive also. The Z68 Pro3, and Z68 Gen3 were a different matter. Those boards had issues. The ASRock X79 Extreme9 was pretty good but I had some issues with the NIC.
 
Dan_D said:
It is a budget board. The price of it and the feature set is in line with that. Granted it has features found on a board at a slightly more expensive price point, but nothing like the P8Z77-WS or Gigabyte Z77X-UP7. The only problem we had was with the PCB being super thin and thus more fragile than it should be. It warps badly enough to make mating the cooling hardware to the CPU something you have to watch. I had taken my test rig down after I finished the article and I can confirm the same thing Kyle saw.

And we've seen other budget offerings from other companies that do not have paper thin PCB's. The MSI Z77A-GD41 comes to mind. Though that board wasn't as good as the Z77 Extreme4 is by any means.

Like I said in the article, it's what ASRock has to do to bring this type of feature set to this price point.



This is not new. All the ASRock PCB's I've seen have been relatively thin compared to those used by ASUS, Gigabyte or MSI.



Actually the ASRock X79 Extreme4 got a positive review and our follow up to that article was positive also. The Z68 Pro3, and Z68 Gen3 were a different matter. Those boards had issues. The ASRock X79 Extreme9 was pretty good but I had some issues with the NIC.
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I havnt run into any problems with the Z68 which is my main machines MB. Luck of the draw maybe eh.
 
Luck of the draw is what happens with the budget boards. Kyle's already said it, you get what you pay for.
 
I build systems with this board all the time using all kinds of coolers, heavy and light for customers. Take it from me: it's good.
 
DarkStryke said:
Luck of the draw is what happens with the budget boards. Kyle's already said it, you get what you pay for.
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That is with any board, it could be bad or have some problem. None of mine have had any, but wondering that maybe some mb's were made different(different place?) or something, since some like the Z68 gen 3 seem to run good.
 
KazeoHin said:
I build systems with this board all the time using all kinds of coolers, heavy and light for customers. Take it from me: it's good.
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Well thats what i am wondering, since I didnt notice on any of them that it was flimsy. It could be that they are all built different or something.(with regards to thickness)
 
I actually got one installed just a couple weeks ago:

http://www.modsrigs.com/detail.aspx?buildid=31556

$80.00 with a i7 3770k combo at Microcenter.

Now, I haven't placed it through some major torture tests yet, but setting it up w/ my h100i I did notice the back bracket did not sit flush of the PCB. However, once it was mounted, there wasn't any movement and seemed stable to me.

Now as far as it feeling "flimsy." I would have to disagree. If you're bending your board installing it... I'm sorry... You're doing it wrong. Sounds like this guy needs to re-learn how to install a motherboard. I've always installed every motherboard gently and never heard a crack.

Warping, in that sense, I could see that happening but again, if everything is mounted correctly, warping should be minimal. We're talking about components weighing no more than 2 lbs.

My major disappointment with the board, but I think it is more with the Z77 chipset, is the horrible support for my RAID 5 array. 3x 1.5 TB 7200 RPM drives. While reads are very impressive (250 MBps) the writes were horrid (35-40 MBps). I understand RAID 5 performance lies on reads and not writes, but I expect more than what a single drive would write to. I pull 65 MBps on a USB 3.0 2.5" 500 GB Western Digital.
 
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I just finished a build with this board. It went very smooth, I have my 3770K running at 4.6 GHz. Like the review said it is very flimsy so you have to take care. I also read that there is sometines problems with the CPU socket pins bending, I had no issues. As many have said you get what you pay for, I did a ton of reading and value for dollar this board was just what I needed. I saved around $100 compared to a board with the same features, I put that money towards a extra SSD. I am very happy with the board with my major complaint being the crappy fan controls on the board.
 
Been using this board for a couple months now. Went from a 3570k to a 3770k oc'd to 4.5 with +.02v offset. No problems at all.

Not bad for $125.

I don't have money for a $300 board which "feels" more solid but doesn't actually improve on the feature set (a whole lot).

Yes it's an Asrock.
Yes they use to make crappy boards back in the day.
Yes it's a leap of faith to use one.
 
To add a point that this review missed out on: Asrock has a cute feature on their Z77 extreme boards called 'no-K OC' that allows you to apply the highest possible multiplier bin to all cores on a non-K intel chip. I had a 3570 (non-K) running at 4.2 ghz on all four cores under Prime95 (105x40). That is pretty impressive; as I understand it, that should only work for a single core on other mobos, but then again I don't really try to OC non-k chips, this was just a test of the Asrock feature.
 
The problem with the thinness of this board is that you have to be careful that you don't fatigue the inner traces residing within the board. To much flex like that in handling and you will sever a trace or a series of traces and you will never know why the board won't function properly because of it. I will certainly stay away from this board just on that alone.
 
I have been running this board since mid June '12. Not a single problem with the board. Has been very stable and did not feel any more flimsy than any other mb I have used. I also did a lot of research and for the price it had the same features as the much more expensive mb's.
 
Wow and i thought that *my* Asrock board was a bit thinner than normal. After seeing that, i feel my board is thick as a brickwall. ;)
 
Methadras said:
The problem with the thinness of this board is that you have to be careful that you don't fatigue the inner traces residing within the board. To much flex like that in handling and you will sever a trace or a series of traces and you will never know why the board won't function properly because of it. I will certainly stay away from this board just on that alone.
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They won't care, it's a ~$100 board that happens to run with a higher tier feature set. Obviously ASRock is not in the charity business, so those costs are being cut in other areas, as noted multiple times.
 
I've had this board for a few months, and have been reasonably happy with it. I did not take any particular notice of how thin the board was, and had no "this is going to snap on me" moments when installing it or adding components. I have a Hyper 212+ installed on this, and so far the weight of the thing hasn't snapped my motherboard in half.

One niggling issue I have, which I'm still not sure is a fault of the board or my operating system (linux), is that when the bottom (furthest from the cpu socket) PCI-E x1 slot is populated it sometimes hangs on OS boot. A quick reboot seems to clear this up. The boot process doesn't get far enough along to print any information, unfortunately. The UEFI BIOS never has any trouble identifying the card installed in that slot. I would think I'd have more frequent issues if I did something like damage a trace due to PCB flex. Any ideas on this would be appreciated, though.

For the money, this has gotten me a pretty amazing virtualization box. VT-d support and the ASMedia sata/usb controllers allow me to pass enough extra hardware around to desktop guests without having to spend extra on controller cards.
 
I've run a large number of motherboards over the years, and currently use an ASRock Z77 OC Formula. Prior to that, I had taken a leap of faith on an ASRock P67 Extreme6 - neither has disappointed. Before these two, I had run a mix of Gigabyte and DFI, with the occasional Asus. I owned a DFI LP X38-T2R that was an incredible overclocker, but that board was also alarmingly flexy. No ill effects were noticed, and believe me when I say that the board had seen an awful lot of mounting and removal cycles, as well as open air testbed abuse.

The Extreme6 definitely had a stronger PCB, but the Z77 OC Formula has an eight layer PCB. If Kyle has one of these in the lab being reviewed (as it sounds like), I don't think you're going to have PCB flex as a listed complaint. It's been a fantastic board for me.

Two years ago, I wouldn't have touched an ASRock board with a 5 foot pole attached to a 10 foot pole. After seeing their products receive increasingly favorable reviews amongst hardware sites and enthusiast forums (sometimes to the utter surprise of the reviewer), it's clear that they're putting some decent effort into the process. I think it's paying off, and I'm glad they're making that effort.
 
My problem with ASRock isn't their out of the box performance. It is the fact that they tend to die 6 months later and getting an RMA out of them is like pulling teeth compared to ASUS, MSI etc. The only computer I would ever put one of their boards in, is one I don't have to be held responsible for.
 
I too, am having good luck with this board. I built a mid-high end water cooled gaming rig, and was ready to spend 2-3x as much for a board, but couldn't find any that let me justify the upcharge. I actually didn't notice the thickness, but this is the first pc I've built in about 6 years, so I'm a bit out of touch.
 
Considering this boards been around for a year I'm curious what the reasoning was behind reviewing it now?
 
KazeoHin said:
I build systems with this board all the time using all kinds of coolers, heavy and light for customers. Take it from me: it's good.
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I've build well over two dozen systems with the Z77E4 (some M), many running ACAD but most running basic apps. None have been OC'd, in case that matters to you, but not a single MB has been problematic. I bought a Z77E6/TB4 before I researched TB devices (which I didn't purchase any after the reviews I read), did have problems with the front USB3 header that the rear ports didn't have. Setting it to USB2 cleared the errors, but I wasn't impressed. Overall I'm still pretty happy with Asrock, even though until now I hadn't used a single one of their motherboards in my almost 20 years of building computers.
 
I might have to consider this even though the 2-layer PCB worries me...

These days it seems like it's impossible to find an INEXPENSIVE decent overclocking Z77 board that has more than two SATA III ports on it.
 
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SpongeBob said:
Considering this boards been around for a year I'm curious what the reasoning was behind reviewing it now?
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Because they hadn't done a review on it?

Because being a Z77 booard it's still quite relevant?
 
KazeoHin said:
To add a point that this review missed out on: Asrock has a cute feature on their Z77 extreme boards called 'no-K OC' that allows you to apply the highest possible multiplier bin to all cores on a non-K intel chip. I had a 3570 (non-K) running at 4.2 ghz on all four cores under Prime95 (105x40). That is pretty impressive; as I understand it, that should only work for a single core on other mobos, but then again I don't really try to OC non-k chips, this was just a test of the Asrock feature.
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This looks like a nice little feature, and I too would like to see the [H] give this a thorough testing. Implementing unique features such as this that no one else has is something that ASRock has been good at for awhile now, even on budget boards.
 
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