Biostar Hi-Fi Z77X Motherboard Review

Today we are going to take a look at the Biostar Hi-Fi Z77X which is the latest model in their range based on this chipset. We were recently very impressed by the Biostar Hi-Fi A85W motherboard which offered a good balance between style, performance and features, while remaining widely affordable. It's clear that Biostar are trying hard to compete with the top motherboard manufacturers as we've seen a number of high-end models for them over the past year. We were especially impressed with the Biostar TZ77XE4 that we looked at a few months back when the Ivy Bridge platform launched. As part of Biostar's 'Hi-Fi' range, this model features enhanced onboard audio. This will help it compete in the market and may swing those enthusiasts who aren't planning to use a dedicated sound card with their system. We will be testing the motherboard with an Intel Core i7-3770K in this review, both at stock speeds and when overclocked. Specification Support the Intel 3rd and 2nd generation Core i7 and Core i5 processors in the 1155 package. Intel Z77 single chip architecture. Support 4-DIMM DDR3-2600(OC)/2400(OC)/2200(OC)/2133(OC)/1866(OC)/1800(OC))/1600/1333 up to 32G maximum capacity. Support SATA 6Gb/s 2X speed than current SATA 3G. Support Intel Smart Response Technology. Support USB 3.0. 100% X.D.C solid capacitor. BIOSTAR Puro Hi-Fi. The Hi-Fi Z77X is supplied in a standard style motherboard box which is decorated in an attractive red and grey livery. The front of the box features a large speaker icon surrounded by sound waves, highlighting the audio-focused nature of this particular model. Turning the box over reveals a series of icons illustrating various features of the motherboard. The box feels fairly robust and should do a good job of protecting the motherboard in transit. There is a generous bundle included with the motherboard which features an array of SATA-600 cables, two-way SLI and CrossFire connectors, an I/O shield and a user guide. Biostar have chosen to use an attractive black and blue colour scheme for the motherboard which consists of a black PCB with black fittings with metallic blue highlights on the heatsinks. This look is very attractive and looks very sophisticated indeed. This particular motherboard utilises the ATX form factor. It's quite clear from a glance that this board has been designed with overclocking in mind as there is a vast expanse of power regulation circuitry surrounding the CPU socket. In the top left hand corner of the motherboard we find an 8-pin CPU power connector nestled in between the heatsinks. To the right of the CPU socket there are four DDR3 memory slots which support up to 32 GB running at frequencies of 2600(OC)/2400(OC)/2200(OC)/2133(OC)/1866(OC)/1800(OC)/1600/1333/1066 MHz in a dual channel configuration. Along the right hand edge of the motherboard, we find the 24-pin power connector in the usual place. In the bottom right hand corner of the motherboard next to the chipset, there are six SATA ports in total, angled at 90 degrees to make cable management simpler. The top two of these are SATA-600 ports and the remaining four are restricted to SATA-300 speeds. Along the bottom edge of the motherboard we find most of the internal headers. From left to right we find an S-PDIF header, a CIR header, a 3-pin fan header, a COM header and two USB2.0 headers. The USB3.0 header is rather illogically placed further up the motherboard between the PCI Express slots. We also find power and reset buttons in the bottom right corner of the motherboard alongside the front panel header and a Dr. Debug LED. There are a fairly wide range of expansion slots included on the motherboard, although Biostar hasn't used any legacy PCI slots. There are two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, one PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot and three PCI Express x1 slots. In the bottom left corner of the motherboard we can see all the onboard audio circuitry. Biostar has integrated an EMI shield into the motherboard around the audio circuitry to prevent interference from other components. Looking at the rear I/O panel we can see that all the basics are catered for. From left to right we find a PS/2 connector, two USB2.0 ports, an HDMI port, a VGA port, a DVI port, two USB3.0 ports, two further USB2.0 ports, a RJ-45 Ethernet jack and six 3.5 mm audio jacks. BIOS While Biostar have created a UEFI interface for the motherboard, it's not up to the standard of those we've seen from Asus and ASRock in the past. All of the usual settings are available throughout a series of menus. All of the overclocking settings we'd usually ask for are present and are fairly easy to find. However, we would like to see Biostar including an automatic OC option on future models for less experienced users. Overclocking We were impressed with the overclocking ability of the Biostar Hi-Fi Z77X. Achieving an overclock of 4.8 GHz was very simple indeed, requiring us only to bump the voltage to 1.36V and the multiplier to 48x. We used this setting for our overclocked tests. See validation here. In this review we are going to test the Biostar Hi-Fi Z77X with an Intel Core i7-3770K processor at both stock and overclocked speeds. The overclocked results were achieved at 4.8 GHz using the settings detailed in the previous section. Test System: Processor: Intel Core i7-3770K Motherboard: Biostar Hi-Fi Z77X Cooler: Phanteks PH-TC14PE Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-4 Memory: 16 GB Mushkin Blackline 1333 MHz Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7950 Power Supply: Silverstone Platinum 1000W System Drive: Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) Software: PCMark 7 3DMark 3DMark 11 3DMark Vantage SiSoft Sandra 2013 Cinebench R11.5 CrystalDiskMark Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.7 VLC Media Player Performance Monitor Unigine Heaven Benchmark Super Pi 1.5 Mod CPUID Hardware Monitor CPU-Z DiRT Showdown Battlefield 3 Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use. In this test we see a decent boost in performance when the system is overclocked. 3DMark is Futuremark’s latest benchmark. It can be used to benchmark and compare everything from mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablets and laptops, to high-end gaming systems. The benchmark is available for Windows, Windows RT Android and iOS. With 3 separate tests, each of which is intended to be used alongside a specific classification of hardware, 3DMark is a very versatile benchmark. Ice Storm is intended to be used with mobile devices, Cloud Gate is good for use with laptops and home PCs, and Fire Strike can be used to push the performance of gaming PCs. We used the ‘Fire Strike’ benchmark which is designed to be used on gaming PCs. We opted for the Normal setting, NOT the Extreme mode. In this test we can see how gaming performance benefits from overclocking. 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page. Again, we see a decent boost in performance when overclocked, especially in the physics test. Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings. As we would expect, overclocking significantly boosts the CPU score of the system. Some impressive scores from our test system in this suite. Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable: Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render. Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux. Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems. Multicore CPU support. Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles). Powerful C++ API. Comprehensive performance profiling system. Flexible XML-based data structures. The performance benefits from overclocking are minimal in this test, but there is a small improvement. SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc. Native ports for all major operating systems are available: Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86) Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64) Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64) Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01) Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02) All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of: SMP – Multi-Processor MC – Multi-Core SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86 IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit An impressive set of results all round in SiSandra. Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor. In this test we can see how performance can benefit from using multi threaded applications when overclocked. Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU. We see a decent reduction in the time taken to complete this test when overclocked. Intel based systems tend to perform much better than AMD ones in this test. A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use one of our favourite benchmark utilities - CrystalDiskMark X64 Edition - to rate performance from the on-board SATA controller. Some very impressive speeds from our Kingston HyperX 3K SSD in this test. WinRAR is one of the most popular archive manager programs available. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. You can try WinRAR before buy, its trial version is available in downloads. We measured the time taken to archive two 2.75 GB .MKV files. Here we can see how the real world performance of our system benefits from overclocking. The Matroska Media container is a very popular, open standard Multimedia container which is usually found as .MKV files. It is a very popular format in enthusiast circles and can be played directly in VLC or Windows Media Player with suitable codecs installed. We played our 1080P MKV movie using the latest version of VLC Media Player and measured the CPU usage with the Performance Monitor built into Windows. Here we see a large reduction in the average CPU usage in this test. CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats. Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology. New and Improved Features Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously. Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention. Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices. Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment. Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A. Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier. For our testing today we are converting a 1.43 GB 720p MKV file to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. Hardware acceleration was enabled to give you a good idea of system wide real world performance. Again, we see a decent boost in real world performance when the system was overclocked. According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware. We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing. The performance benefits of overclocking were minimal in this game and there was only a very small boost in performance. Black Ops 2 is the latest episode in the Call of Duty franchise and is one of the most popular games of the moment. It uses an updated version of the IW engine, used in previous Call of Duty games, which isn't particularly demanding. This makes it ideal for testing mid-range gaming systems like this. We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing. Black Ops 2 is a little more CPU intensive than Battlefield 3 so the scores are affected more by overclocking. Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007. We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing. Again we see a decent boost in framerate when the system was overclocked. We measured the power consumption of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We recorded results with the system at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.7 GHz. We see a big jump in power consumption with the system overclocked, We have been left with positive impressions of the Biostar Hi-Fi Z77X thanks to the impressive feature set on offer and the attractive design of the motherboard. In fact, the black and blue colour scheme is one of the most classy looking we've seen and gives the top three motherboard manufacturers a run for their money. Don't think for a moment that this motherboard has just a pretty face. The overclocking performance of the Hi-Fi Z77X is very impressive indeed and we managed to boost our Intel Core i7-3770K to 4.8 GHz in a matter of minutes. There isn't an automatic overclocking feature like those present on Asus' and Asrock's motherboards, though, so those who have no experience overclocking may be left wanting. The UEFI interface leaves a lot to be desired, too, and is nowhere near as intuitive or as easy to use as those included on Asus, ASRock and Gigabyte motherboards. One of our only other gripes with this motherboard is the illogical placement of the USB 3.0 internal header which is inbetween two PCI Express lanes. This causes problems from a cable management point of view as it's more or less in the centre of the motherboard. It may also foul longer expansion cards. They really do need to redress this in future revisions. We admire the emphasis that Biostar has put on audio quality with this motherboard and the quality of the onboard chip certainly exceeds the vast majority of competing models. The Hi-Fi Z77X is available at £105 from Ebuyer. It is well priced but competition is fierce with models such as the Gigabyte Z77X-D3H making a very attractive alternative. While Biostar may not be as highly regarded as Gigabyte in enthusiast circles, the Hi-Fi Z77X performs just as well as the big brand boards. The 'Hi-Fi' features of the motherboard make it ideal for use in a media system or for those who are looking for high quality audio without having to spend extra on a dedicated solution. Pros: Good value for money. Impressive onboard audio. Attractive design. Excellent overclocking performance. Cons: Dated UEFI interface. Illogical USB3.0 header placement. KitGuru says: Another impressive motherboard from Biostar.