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.

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A Closer Look Part IV

Next to the right we have two additional fan headers along with the USB 3.0 header:

 

 

 

Next, we have the 24-pin ATX power header along with the V-Probe:

 

 

 

With V-Probe, the users are able to monitor the onboard components voltages with a multimeter, including VCCM, VCCSA, VTT1, VTT2, VCORE, DMI_COMP, PCH2 and so on. Nearby we have a separare row of status LEDs:

 

 

 

In the top right corner we will see the Dr. Debug LED display, the switches for enabling/disabling the PCI-Express slots and the Rapid OC buttons for allowing users to quickly and easily adjust OC frequency

 

 

 

The CPU Fan headers are to be found near the VRM heatsink:

 

 

 

The VRM heatsink is big but should not cause problems when installing large CPU coolers (we have used the D14 and everything went fine); the heatsink is also a water block:

 

 

 

 

 

The DIMM slots are color coded so we can properly identify the channels:

 

 

 

On the bottom side of the motherboard we can see a blackplate which ensures that the PCB won’t bend due to the weight:

 

 

 

The motherboard comes with the following I/O Shield connectors/ports:

 

-PS/2 keyboard/mouse port

-6x USB 3.0 ports

-Clear CMOS button

-HDMI port

-LAN RJ45 port

-4x USB 2.0 ports

-Audio ports

 

 

 

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