Testing
Overclocking First::
It must be noted that XMP may be an issue for some memory and you should check the compatibility list before buying your memory.
Overclocking on air this board is an equal to ASUS and Gigabyte boards using the Ivy Bridge CPU where clock speeds between 4.6 and 4.8 are easily achievable. Unfortunately the wall comes into play very quickly with these processors and almost exponential voltage increases are needed to move higher than 4.8Ghz in most cases. The core temps were a bit lower on the Z77 FTW and even after 16+ hours of AIDA at 4.6 GHz the temps never strayed above 81 C
We were more than satisfied with the OC performance on air simply because we could stay cooler.
Drive and Port Testing:
Moving away from overclocking and into the rest of the system for this review we find that there are plenty of ports to fill and we did just that:
The final tally was eight internal drives, seven external drives, one external optical drive, two SDHC (8GB) flash cards/readers and one 4 GB thumb drive.
The initial testing started out testing all drives independently at stock speeds and after that things started falling apart. Initial independent drive testing went off without a hitch (shots are 1920 x 1080):
This; however, did not last. We had to remove two smaller thumb drives and reconfigure everything to retest as when we overclocked we would have crashes that seemed to be associated with them.
When we did reach a configuration that seemed stable we ran into more USB issues:
- messages stating that the drive needed reformatted
- more crashes
- ATTO freezes
- Dropped drives
Finally we removed all of the external and internal drives for testing in another unit and all came back good. We added an external USB 3.0 raid enclosure with two drives (all new) and began anew with more failures. We moved drives from port to port until we had some success. Success until we had to replug our mouse anyway.
It seems that there are major issues using adjacent USB 3.0 ports (some 2.0 issues as well) at high bandwidth concurrently and could only be alleviated by again changing ports. We do not know the cause of this and this instability prevented us from running a streaming test: both network adapters and four drives (two internal and two external) would be used to stream five streams (two from one drive and one from each of the others) while running standardized benchmarks to look at the impact of using this board as a home server and workstation concurrently.
After this we decided that it was time to quit. This was the second Z77 FTW that we had received (first had BIOS issues, dropped RAIDS and dropped USB accessories as well) and we had quite a bit of of work in these boards with mediocre results at most everything – except overclocking. We really do not like to do this but there comes a point where no matter how much time and money you pour into a product you are not going to get the results you are looking for.
