ECS Elitegroup Z77H2-AX Golden Board (Z77) Motherboard Review

Now this is the part that gets interesting, and not in a good way at all. All I’m going to say, is that the voltage readings within BIOS are inaccurate by around .200V, so that when you think you’ve set 1.4V, you’ve actually set 1.6V and as we know with Ivy Bridge, that’s not exactly a safe voltage. Luckily we were under watercooling but this could have ended a lot worse, and I honestly fear for the general consumer who may end up frying their new $350 processor.

On to the overclock, and from our initial tests, we knew that 4.6GHz was an easy achievement with around 1.35V and we were able to run all of our tests on this overclock, but we wanted to push things further. This is where we started by pushing the voltage to 1.4V and the multiplier to 47x to which the board booted and went straight into Windows. After a session of Super Pi, 3DMark 11 Physics test and a long stint of Prime95, we were happy enough that things were stable.

Our next step was to try the 48x multiplier, to which the system booted, but Windows quickly ended it with a BSOD. Our other option was to try raising the BCLK to get close to 4.8GHz, or at least anything above 4.7GHz.

With a raised BCLK to 101MHz, the system gave us a BSOD almost immediately and we knew that this board and BCLK adjustment wasn’t going to be favoured. Disabling spread spectrum and increasing the SA voltage also didn’t help and alas, we ended up at 4.7GHz.

For our i7 3770k, we know that it doesn’t overclock that well, but 4.7GHz is still quite an achievement at 1.4V but we do feel that if we could get some lower temperatures, and an increase of the voltages, we could get it to run at 4.8GHz.