Asus P8Z77-V Premium review

The P8Z77-V Premium is a hugely expensive motherboard for Intel Ivy Bridge processors, but it has a couple of tricks up its sleeve which help to justify the expense. There’s a 32GB mSATA SSD plugged into the motherboard that operates as a cache, and this is the first motherboard we’ve seen with a Thunderbolt port for super-fast file transfers to external devices.

There’s the port that all the fuss is about

Thunderbolt was previously only available on Apple products, so we were interested to see how well the new interface would work on a PC. We tested it using an Elgato Thunderbolt external drive, which contains a Sandisk SSD. The Thunderbolt interface is definitely quick; 184MB/s when writing large files is what we expect to see from internally mounted SSDs, and large-file read speeds and small-file read and write speeds are also very quick indeed. Thunderbolt isn’t hugely faster than USB3 in everyday use, though, and Thunderbolt devices are very expensive.

There’s plenty else beside it, though

The board also comes with a USB 3.0 Boost application, which promises to speed up USB3 transfers by up to 170%. Sadly, USB 3.0 Boost didn’t make any difference in our benchmarks when testing with a Buffalo Extreme USB3 external hard disk.

We found the onboard SSD cache more useful. Using an SSD as a cache for a mechanical disk means you can have an SSD speed boost and still have a large and inexpensive system disk. With modern games such as Mass Effect 3 taking up 15GB of disk space, you’ll quickly run out of room on a 120GB SSD, so the benefit of caching is obvious.

The board comes with Asus’s own SSD caching utility, which promises to make setup particularly easy. However, this only works with SSDs plugged into the Marvell controller’s SATA3 ports, and it doesn’t recognise the onboard SSD. To use the onboard drive, we had to plug our mechanical hard disk into one of the Intel SATA ports and then set the SATA ports to RAID mode in the board’s graphical EFI BIOS. Once we’d booted back into Windows and run the Intel Rapid Storage utility, we could set up caching with the onboard SSD without a problem.

This made a significant difference to performance. As measured with the free Bootracer utility, booting into Windows 7 took 49s with a normal hard disk, while the cache took us to the desktop within a very swift 18s. The cache didn’t make any difference to write speeds in our benchmark tests, but it improved large-file read speeds from 52MB/s to 192MB/s, and small file read speeds from 28MB/s to 76MB/s. It definitely makes programs load faster and Windows feel snappier.

The Asus cache program also worked fine with a mechanical hard disk and an SSD plugged into the Marvell SATA ports. We couldn’t understand how to work the application at first, but once we’d deleted the cache that the program had automatically set up and re-enabled it, caching worked perfectly.

This board really is packed with features. On the rear you have two USB2 and four USB3 ports, as well as a couple of eSATA and Thunderbolt ports. There are 7.1 analogue surround sound outputs and an optical S/PDIF output, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and HDMI and DisplayPort graphics outputs. The motherboard comes with a box to fit in your 3 1/2in drive bay which has a couple of USB3 ports, and there’s also a Wi-Fi module and antenna.

You have plenty of expansion options, too, thanks to two SATA3 and two SATA2 ports on the Intel controller and four SATA3 ports on the Marvell storage chip. There are four PCI Express x16 slots and the board supports four-way SLI or CrossFire. There are also a couple of PCI Express x1 slots. When fitted with an Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K processor, we saw an overall score of 115 in our benchmarks, which is what we expect from this chipset and processor.

Asus’s P8Z77-V Premium is a top-specification Ivy Bridge motherboard with every feature you could possibly need. For most people, though, it will be overkill. The SSD caching function works on any motherboard with an Intel Z77 chipset, so if you’re willing to find somewhere to mount a separate SSD you’ll still able to take advantage of the chipset’s caching functions. If you’re desperate for Thunderbolt’s high speeds, this is the only motherboard that currently has the port, but the vast majority of people will be fine with USB3. Nonetheless, if you want the most feature-packed Intel motherboard there is, the P8Z77-V Premium is the model to have.