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ASRock Z77 OC Formula Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1155 by stefan @ 2013-02-04

The Z77 OC Formula is one of the high performance motherboards from ASRock, was built in cooperation with the well-known overclocker Nick Shih and features a 12 + 4 VRM design covered by a massive waterblock/heatsink, an 8-layer PCB, measuring points, plenty of thermal sensors and more. What we also like about this board is the fact that they have removed the legacy components like Floppy/IDE interfaces along with the PCI slots, in order to have a clean motherboard PCB design in the end.

A Closer Look Part III

One catchy feature is the representation of the 8-layer PCB on the left side of the board:

The SuperIO chip on the board is a Nuvoton NCT6776D which is seconded by another Nuvoton NCT7904D monitoring chip:

Near the secondary PCI-Express X16 slot we can find the CMOS battery along with the jumper:

One PLX PEX8605 chip is used for switching purposes of the PCI-Express lanes to the necessary devices:

Now let’s go a little to the bottom side of the board and check out the headers (from left to right):

-Front Panel Audio Header

-COM Port Header

-SLI/XFire Power Connector

-Infrared Module Header

-Chassis Fan Connector

-Consumer Infrared Module Header

-USB 2.0 header

Next, we have:

-USB 2.0 header

-Chassis Fan Connector

-BIOS Selection Jumper

-USB 2.0 Header

-2x64Mb SPI Flash Memory (Main & Backup BIOS)

-Reset Switch

-Power Switch

-System Panel Header

-Power LED Header

-Chassis Speaker Header

The two Marvell 88SE9172 controllers provide a total of four SATA 6Gbps ports:

The SATA ports are also colored differently so we can differentiate easily between the SATA II ones and the SATA III. SATA3_M0/M1/M2/M3 ports are made available by the controllers and the rest are made available by the Z77 chipset:

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