Overclocking

Overclocking with the ASRock Z77 OC Formula was not very good. Well, that's not entirely accurate, either. If you are a traditional user, and are not into tweaking your system to get the maximum performance possible, this board may prove to be difficult to get stable. I could not get the default XMP profile for my Corsair 2666 MHz DIMMs stable on its own, and voltage changes did not help either. I had to, to get 2666 MHz working for more about 10 minutes, completely change tertiary timings, which seemed tuned to two sticks, rather than the four I had installed.

Clocking the CPU proved much the same as other recently tested boards, requiring 1.225 V to get 4.6 GHz fully stable. This is very similar to other results I have seen with this CPU and my new Corsair memory kit, so these results are exactly as expected. I managed to get this CPU stable at lower voltages, using a different memory kit with less sticks and a lower speed, but this new memory kit has its own settings it likes as well.

All in all, I had a lot of fun overclocking with the ASRock Z77 OC Formula. Every setting in the BIOS had some sort of impact on performance, and I never ran into a "What is this doing?!? Anything?!?" moment as I have with other products that only seem to benefit from changes to a few choice settings. That does make things a bit harder for inexperienced users, but it's great to see such potential unleashed from day one.

ASRock also understands that some users may need some help getting the board up and running, and they have added the ability for users to share BIOS profiles. If someone you know has a similar build, but gets better results, you can swap profiles and see if there is some magic in that other user's profile. That, on its own, should also help with end-user support by ensuring that wide memory compatibility is possible. I had some initial issues with mine, but it didn't take me long to figure things out. I, however, do play with a new board every week.

Overclocked Performance Summary

I have really changed how I do my overclock testing with motherboards. Every single test you see in the main section is repeated in the section that follows, including power consumption. As I test more products, a good picture of overclocking efficiency should emerge, which should prove interesting when it comes to those products that are 100% overclocking-oriented. I have grouped the results into sections here, and all products are tested with 4.6 GHz CPU speed. Memory speeds vary depending on the platform's ability.


Power consumed when overclocked with the ASRock Z77 OC Formula was very respectable and actually far less than I had expected. Nice job, ASRock!

AIDA64

When overclocked, memory bandwidth was actually very good, with Latency and Copy performance posting top results. Write and Read performance was pretty good too, just shy of ASUS's results.

CPU OC Performance

CPU overclock performance was OK, with SuperPi efficiency being absolutely fantastic. The rest, however, left a bit to be desired.

3D-Oriented OC Performance

Pure 3D performance was pretty good, with real 3D-centric benchmarks posting very good results, while the more CPU-focused tests were not as good. It seems clear that ASRock has tuned the Z77 OC Formula for 3D performance.