ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Review: A Bentley Among Motherboards

For a motherboard that has all this functionality, it is a small victory that ASUS have managed to fit it all into a normal ATX sized motherboard rather than the E-ATX form factor. Our first focus is the socket area, which has on two sides a very substantial pair of heatsinks covering the power delivery. Compared some other boards at a similar price range, these heatsinks are not connected via a heatpipe to each other, like the P8Z77-V Deluxe. This could show that ASUS are confident in their cooling solution for their high end channel boards.

The socket area has five 4-pin fan headers nearby for use by CPU coolers – two north of the top heatpipe, two next to the bottom of the IO panel, and another by the 24-pin ATX power connector. The other 4-pin fan header on board is located on the bottom near the front panel connectors.

The P8Z77-V Premium uses a single 8-pin 12V CPU power connector for CPU power, and also has ASUS’ single ended memory latch design for the DIMMs. Down the right hand side we have the TPM header, a MemOK button (in case memory settings are too tight), the 24-pin ATX power connector, a USB 3.0 header and a single SATA 3 Gbps port pointing out of the board. I used this single SATA 3 Gbps (powered from the chipset) for my primary disk, such that I would always know where it was connected.

The SATA ports are color coded – the top four in dark blue come from a Marvell 9230 controller (so SATA 6 Gbps) and are used for the ASUS SSD Caching II. Underneath this are the two SATA 6 Gbps from the chipset in white, and then two SATA 3 Gbps from the chipset in light blue. Next to this is the chipset heatsink, which is large to cover the chipset, but also both the Marvell SATA controllers. It should be noted for the Marvell controllers’ use an x2 PCIe interconnect rather than an x1 – this allows the use of multiple SSDs to be used in the caching system. The setup also allows multiple caching scenarios (SSD + mechanical and another SSD + mechanical) which is something ASUS has implemented due to the request of users. This is all adjustable via a simple GUI provided as part of AI Suite.

 

Our mSATA port comes below the chipset heatsink and the SATA ports. This is a single mSATA 3 Gbps from the chipset to power a 32GB LiteOn SSD. ASUS calls this their ‘Complete System Boosting Solution’. While it is nice to have an extra 32GB SSD as part of the system build, ASUS expect the primary focus will be with the SSD caching – users having a mechanical hard drive and using the onboard SSD as a smart cache. My perception on the other hand is that if a user is laying down $450 for a motherboard, chances are they can buy a fully blown SATA 6 Gbps SSD as an OS drive. This leaves the 32GB SSD as either storage, somewhere to offload the pagefile, or as an OS drive itself – note that 32GB is below the recommended amount for Windows 7 64-bit.