ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Motherboard Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Motherboard Review - It’s been awhile since we’ve seen the "Premium" moniker on any ASUS boards. ASUS reserves this for boards with truly premium features that set these apart from the rest of the product line. The end result is usually a complex product with more features than most people will ever need. Let's find out just how premium the P8Z77-V Premium truly is.
 
Fixed. Thanks, Kyle.


@Dan
How do you pronounce that name of yours?

On topic:
Way more board than I will ever need, and FAR more expensive a board than I want. Not saying it isn't worth it to a select group, just stating the obvious.
 
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Excellent review. I understand this board is for a niche market, but I am definitely interested in it and appreciate you taking the time to run it through its paces.
 
Another Asus MB review. Although thorough and informative, it would be nice to see other manufacturer brands reviewed with the same frequency.

An interesting review for me would be the appalling state of tech support and RMA non-existence with major brand manufacturers (Asrock, Asus, Gigabyte, etc.). Seems that ducking responsibility for those is running rampant these days; that is just as important to me as the product itself.
 
WOW!!! Lotta work there on an ugly board, no disrespect meant. As you guys said it's no ROG board so aesthetics aside it seems a hellova monster to tame - in the past I would have loved such a board with all that connectivity (Thunderbolt as well fgs?!), now it just scares me!! Which is why I run an itty-bitty Gene:eek::eek:
I do have a question about the power/phase arrangement. In another thread someone mentioned Asus(and others) was playing lazy with the truth regarding it's 6/2 (?) or whatever it is setup on the new z77 Gene board. Hiding stuff under giant heatsinks was mentioned. Have you guys had a look under the heatsinks of this Premium model at any stage and is it something we should even care about? My board seems to work great, without checking I have no idea about it's setup...but it works great - they could give me a 2/2 setup and I probably wouldnt know is my point because my board seems to work great..so is Asus hiding something under that blue h/sink or, like I have done, is it just more stuff to put in the 'doesnt matter, I'm no electrician/technician basket'..?
Also about Thunderbolt - I had heard of it but yours is the first explanation I have bothered to read, so thnx for the new info. It seems a very exciting interface - storage and monitor on the same link, WOW!!! USB in some regards - daisy chaining comes to mind but to wack a monitor @the end of that is just so nice!!! Just out of curiosity, how does T/bolt compare to DVI D/L bandwidth? Could you give a comparison, I know I could look it up but you guys do this so much better...;););)
 
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hdfreedom said:
Another Asus MB review. Although thorough and informative, it would be nice to see other manufacturer brands reviewed with the same frequency.

An interesting review for me would be the appalling state of tech support and RMA non-existence with major brand manufacturers (Asrock, Asus, Gigabyte, etc.). Seems that ducking responsibility for those is running rampant these days; that is just as important to me as the product itself.
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Unfortunately this is a subject which could spawn a never-ending thread - The Asus name has stood for 'sorry, no home!!' tech support for a long time now and ducking responsibility is everywhere and close to a national sport in our country(Aussie), so stories of such are immeasurable..Woopie, a carbon tax!!!! Anyone else have to pay a carbon tax?????????????????? Sorry, that has nothing to do with the current subject....

Great review of the p8Z77-v Premium..:eek:;);)
 
If I were spending that much on a board, the price difference between the 39xx cpus and boards starts to diminish. To me this board is the overkill of the low end...kid of like ricing out a toyota camry.
 
Does this motherboard support 3 displays? According to Intel the Z77 chipset supports 3 displays *IF* it has 2 Displayport outputs. Does the Thunderbolt port act as an independent Displayport or does it simply act as a passthrough and disables the dedicated onboard Displayport when a monitor is hooked up to the Thunderbolt?
 
hdfreedom said:
Another Asus MB review. Although thorough and informative, it would be nice to see other manufacturer brands reviewed with the same frequency.

An interesting review for me would be the appalling state of tech support and RMA non-existence with major brand manufacturers (Asrock, Asus, Gigabyte, etc.). Seems that ducking responsibility for those is running rampant these days; that is just as important to me as the product itself.
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That is really a separate subject. We've often bashed ASUS for it's piss poor web infrasturcture years ago but this has since been addressed by ASUS for the most part. Aside from that, I've heard the same things but I've never had to personally use ASUS tech support or RMA services. I've never had an ASUS board that I've personally owned die on me or develop hardware problems while under warranty. And to date I've only ever damaged one of them on the test bench. That's in the last 6 years out of how ever many countless ASUS boards I've reveiwed. So while I understand concerns about RMA and support services, and even share them to some extent, I don't think most people will need them with ASUS boards.

ivansoze1 said:
WOW!!! Lotta work there on an ugly board, no disrespect meant. As you guys said it's no ROG board so aesthetics aside it seems a hellova monster to tame - in the past I would have loved such a board with all that connectivity (Thunderbolt as well fgs?!), now it just scares me!! Which is why I run an itty-bitty Gene:eek::eek:
I do have a question about the power/phase arrangement. In another thread someone mentioned Asus(and others) was playing lazy with the truth regarding it's 6/2 (?) or whatever it is setup on the new z77 Gene board. Hiding stuff under giant heatsinks was mentioned. Have you guys had a look under the heatsinks of this Premium model at any stage and is it something we should even care about? My board seems to work great, without checking I have no idea about it's setup...but it works great - they could give me a 2/2 setup and I probably wouldnt know is my point because my board seems to work great..so is Asus hiding something under that blue h/sink or, like I have done, is it just more stuff to put in the 'doesnt matter, I'm no electrician/technician basket'..?
Also about Thunderbolt - I had heard of it but yours is the first explanation I have bothered to read, so thnx for the new info. It seems a very exciting interface - storage and monitor on the same link, WOW!!! USB in some regards - daisy chaining comes to mind but to wack a monitor @the end of that is just so nice!!! Just out of curiosity, how does T/bolt compare to DVI D/L bandwidth? Could you give a comparison, I know I could look it up but you guys do this so much better...;););)
Click to expand...

No, we do not pull apart the cooling system and look at the power phases in that detail. I do my best to get an accurate phase count or pull it from their published specifications if they are listed. In some cases they aren't but we are forwarded documentation by their PR departments which help give us more insight into their construction. The thing is, we are evaluating the board hardware, but also the user experience as well. How it performs out of the box, etc. We can't very well pull the board apart too much and still do that. If we did this it would have to be after testing was complete and we knew we didn't need anything more from it.

And manufacturers are getting away from the power phase pissing contest. It seems widely known that quality beats quantity every time. Also having 32 power phases on a board eats up a lot of real estate. Real estate they can't afford to lose on a standard ATX PCB. I think stability testing and overclocking performance says what you need to know by itself. No that doesn't cover longevity, but there isn't a really good way to do that. The incubation and torture tests we do are beyond what you would normally do to a motherboard and have to suffice as a an indicator of quality.

As for DVI bandwidth, single-link DVI is limited to about 3.94Gb/s after overhead is subtracted. (Which there is a lot of relatively speaking.) Dual-Link DVI's limits aren't something I've been able to find. Though it's usually listed as being twice single link or limited by the copper conductors used to make the cables and the devices transmitting and receiving the signals. So I don't know what it's bandwidth is limited to really. Thunderbolt may not have more straight up bandwidth by itself but it sure is a hell of a lot more flexible as a connector and in terms of protocols.

rtangwai said:
Does this motherboard support 3 displays? According to Intel the Z77 chipset supports 3 displays *IF* it has 2 Displayport outputs. Does the Thunderbolt port act as an independent Displayport or does it simply act as a passthrough and disables the dedicated onboard Displayport when a monitor is hooked up to the Thunderbolt?
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Yes, this motherboard does indeed support 3 displays as I stated in the article. The Thunderbolt port passes display signals from the iGPU through it. So a simple mini-DP cable is all you need to use this on it's own. You don't have to take advantage of Thunderbolt at all to use it as a display port.

psyside said:
For 450, there is Maximus V Extreme, which is alot better then this.
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They have very different feature sets. The P8Z77-V Premium has far more connectivity options than the Maximus V Extreme does. The latter would be what I'd choose for straight up performance and overclockability, but the P8Z77-V Premium has a lot more going for it in the general feature department. SSD Caching, Thunderbolt, etc. ROG features are more performance and tuning oriented. Many of their features like the ProbeIt are more useful as a diagnostic tool than anything. ROG Connect also falls under that category.

These boards are apples and oranges really. Not the same at all.
 
Dan_D said:
They have very different feature sets. The P8Z77-V Premium has far more connectivity options than the Maximus V Extreme does. The latter would be what I'd choose for straight up performance and overclockability, but the P8Z77-V Premium has a lot more going for it in the general feature department. SSD Caching, Thunderbolt, etc. ROG features are more performance and tuning oriented. Many of their features like the ProbeIt are more useful as a diagnostic tool than anything. ROG Connect also falls under that category.

These boards are apples and oranges really. Not the same at all.
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MVE has Thunderbolt as well, and i'm pretty sure Asus have their own SSD caching feature that work on almost every board, regardless of Intel metod - license ;)
 
psyside said:
MVE has Thunderbolt as well, and i'm pretty sure Asus have their own SSD caching feature that work on almost every board, regardless of Intel metod - license ;)
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I was thinking of the Maximus IV Extreme or one of the other millions of ROG boards there seem to be out at any given time. The ASUS SSD caching feature is a feature of the Marvell 9128 and 9230 controllers. The feature isn't as robust as the Intel version. Additionally the P8Z77-V Premium has an mSATA SSD that comes with the board. The SSD can only work with the Intel controller as that's what it is physically attached to. The Maximus doesn't come with one. Nor does it have an mSATA slot. Not a big deal, but desirable to some.
 
Dan_D said:
I was thinking of the Maximus IV Extreme or one of the other millions of ROG boards there seem to be out at any given time. The ASUS SSD caching feature is a feature of the Marvell 9128 and 9230 controllers. The feature isn't as robust as the Intel version. Additionally the P8Z77-V Premium has an mSATA SSD that comes with the board. The SSD can only work with the Intel controller as that's what it is physically attached to. The Maximus doesn't come with one. Nor does it have an mSATA slot. Not a big deal, but desirable to some.
Click to expand...

Ah ok, thanks for clearing up things!
 
psyside said:
For 450, there is Maximus V Extreme, which is alot better then this.
Click to expand...

Why do you think that? A lot better? I wanted to get the Premium since I've first seen the specs. But while I'm waiting for it to become available in my area, I can't help wondering if there's something better (especially at this extravagant price). Would the Extreme V be a better candidate for a 24/7 multi-purpose system built to last for 4-5 years?

Apparently the VRM design on the newer Gene/Formula/Maximus is of poorer quality compared to the older Maximus IV Extreme. Unfortunately I could find anything about the Premium. It has more phases, yes, but what about their quality?
 
Apparently the VRM design on the newer Gene/Formula/Maximus is of poorer quality compared to the older Maximus IV Extreme. Unfortunately I could find anything about the Premium. It has more phases, yes, but what about their quality?
Click to expand...

Remember, the glass isn't half full or half empty, but rather twice as large as it needs to be.
 
ender_speaker said:
Why do you think that? A lot better? I wanted to get the Premium since I've first seen the specs. But while I'm waiting for it to become available in my area, I can't help wondering if there's something better (especially at this extravagant price). Would the Extreme V be a better candidate for a 24/7 multi-purpose system built to last for 4-5 years?

Apparently the VRM design on the newer Gene/Formula/Maximus is of poorer quality compared to the older Maximus IV Extreme. Unfortunately I could find anything about the Premium. It has more phases, yes, but what about their quality?
Click to expand...

FaRKle0079 said:
Remember, the glass isn't half full or half empty, but rather twice as large as it needs to be.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately the quality of the phases is an unknown. Everyone says they've got a robust VRM design, and overclocking and our tortue testing is about the only measure of quality we get on these things. All I can tell you is that they overclock well, are stable and didn't give us any problems during our testing. I can say the same about Intel, Gigabyte, MSI, etc. in that regard. It's more hit and miss with some other brands though.

Generally speaking ROG boards overclock a little better than their P8xxx series counterparts do. They also tend to overclock better than a lot of other brands do.
 
FaRKle0079 said:
Remember, the glass isn't half full or half empty, but rather twice as large as it needs to be.
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I smell an engineer ;)

The water uses half of the volume available with the chosen glass ;)

EDIT:

On the topic of phases and quality.
DAN_D hit the nail on the head, it is very difficult to figure out the quality of the power delivery system.
Every manufacturer will advertise their solution as being very robust and testing is often the only way to test the given claim.
 
runs2far said:
I smell an engineer ;)

The water uses half of the volume available with the chosen glass ;)

EDIT:

On the topic of phases and quality.
DAN_D hit the nail on the head, it is very difficult to figure out the quality of the power delivery system.
Every manufacturer will advertise their solution as being very robust and testing is often the only way to test the given claim.
Click to expand...

And unfortunately, stress testing like the kind we do will expose weak power systems to some degree, but only long term usage will tell the whole truth. Even then you need a large sample size to know what's well built and what isn't. Case in point, back in the day motherboards with bad capacitors tested fine and got great reviews only to be dead less than six months down the line due to bad capacitors and fried VRM's.

I've seen this with a lot of electronics, especially motherboards and video card hardware even years after the faulty capacitors were exposed. Apple and some other companies continued to use these insufficient and poor quality caps. The first flat iMac's that didn't have the upside down bowl styled base were good examples of this. There was a rash of GeForce cards with poor VRM's and capacitors in the GeForce 4 days which had cards crapping out left and right. I saw bad capacitors on motherboards from lesser tier manufacturers such as Soyo and EPoX well after the rest of the industry cleaned up their act.

Finally there was the 600 series nForce chipset based boards. They had a rough start even in review circles, but some boards even managed to slip by reviewers only to have problems in the wild. The bad voltage regulation and poor longevity was a problem for the better part of two years. It plagues the design even into the 700 series reference boards. EVGA even got it's start designing their own boards by modifying NVIDIA reference designs and addressing their poor power systems. Unfortunately, when it comes to the quality of electronic components time is the best indicator of that quality. Unfortunately one can not expose the faults of some of these electronics in the few days to a couple week time span we tend to have with each product. That is not for lack of trying, but even the poorest electronics need only survive harsh conditions and testing for a short period to get a good review.

The fact of the matter is most of the boards we review from the major manufacturers are generally somewhere between good and excellent in terms of quality and features. I've seen alpha hardware from these makers which can actually pass the most stringent of tests. There are boards out there that can't make the cut, believe me. They don't make it past Kyle very often, so I rarely even see these. Though I've sometimes encountered such boards in systems built by friends or whatever who didn't consult anyone before taking the plunge. Boards from PC Chips, and some other manufacturers come to mind. Many of the shittiest boards come from companies that don't have a PR system in place in North America who don't send review samples, and don't end up on reviewers radar who don't last very long in the market. Companies like QDI, MTech and others come to mind that are here and gone before most people ever noticed them.
 
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It seems there is no "motherboard thunderbolt out + AMD/NVIDIA + software" versus "direct graphic card (mini)displayport out", benchmark comparisson.

I'm interested to use one thunderbolt 27" display on such a new system, will it give the same FRAMES PER SECOND and same responsiveness as if i would have a same displayport monitor attached to the graphic card out directly, instead of using the motherboard thunderbolt out, witch needs some addon software?

Does all games, even photoshop (hardware supported), work with it (software)?
 
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einer2060 said:
It seems there is no "motherboard thunderbolt out + AMD/NVIDIA + software" versus "direct graphic card (mini)displayport out", benchmark comparisson.
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Because this wasn't done. This requires the use of the Lucid Logic VirtuMVP software in conjunction with the hardware for it. Possible configurations differ on this with performance hits ranging from none to about 10 percent.

einer2060 said:
I'm interested to use one thunderbolt 27" display on such a new system, will it give the same FRAMES PER SECOND and same responsiveness as if i would have a same displayport monitor attached to the graphic card out directly, instead of using the motherboard thunderbolt out, witch needs some addon software?

Does all games, even photoshop (hardware supported), work with it (software)?
Click to expand...

Given that the Thunderbolt port passes video from the onboard GPU and that anything using a discreet card must go through that using Virtu MVP, performance could be impacted. I've tested Virtu MVP before in this manner (not with Thunderbolt) and found that it could hit performance despite ASUS and Intel telling me that it didn't. This does vary by configuration and potentially by game. I didn't test a broad range of games in this way, so I can't speak to that. As far as games and software working in this manner, yes they do. But I can't answer the performance question with 100% certainty.

Thunderbolt by itself is more than capable of providing the same responsiveness displayport and DVI do, so any performance impact will come from data going through the onboard GPU and passing through the Thunderbolt port.
 
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Is anybody else having trouble with audio on this board? I'm using the TB port to connect to my monitor and it's the only way I get any audio. But I'm only getting super static-y sound. When I plug into the board directly, I don't get anything.
 
WTF?! I wonder if that's due to having to many issues? Should I just return it for a refund and get another board?
 
cisco guy said:
premium has been discontinued
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Boards like this sell very few units. They tend to be more for PR purposes than anything.

CyberKP4 said:
WTF?! I wonder if that's due to having to many issues? Should I just return it for a refund and get another board?
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Why is there something wrong with yours? I never had any problems with the one we tested and it got abused pretty bad with both Kyle and I trying to kill it.
 
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