| Intel DZ77GA-70K Benchmark Performance |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards | |
| Written by David Ramsey | |
| Sunday, 06 May 2012 | |
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Intel DZ77GA-70K ConclusionIMPORTANT: Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusion, as it represents our product rating specifically for the product tested which may differ from future versions. Benchmark Reviews begins our conclusion with a short summary for each of the areas that we rate. After years of mediocre Extreme motherboards, Intel finally has a serious contender in the DZ77GA-70K. With a good array of features and excellent performance, the skull logos Intel likes to plaster all over this series of boards doesn't look quite as silly as it used to. 
There are a few things I'd change: I see no reason for PCI slots on a modern enthusiast level motherboard, for example. And the power circuitry isn't quite up to the standard set by some of the high end third party boards Intel is competing against. Last, this board is very light on Windows-based utility software. But the incredible BIOS is so good that it almost completely makes up for that lack. The Intel DZ77GA-70K sticks with Intel's standard white/black/gray color scheme. Some ports are accented in yellow and red plastic, which makes them very visible on the board if nor particularly aesthetic. The build quality is excellent. There are many very small components on this board, but there's no over-soldering and the components all line up. Even the solder mask is placed with extreme precision. The performance, overall, was about equal to the ASUS motherboard and slightly better than the MSI motherboard. This might not seem like much but is better than Intel has done in the past. The value of this board is hard to judge in its current form. As usual with early Intel review boards, it's missing some accessories that I presume will be included with the retail board, like SATA cables and a manual. Still, I think I have enough here to make a stab at evaluating it. While not as feature-rich as some of the top-end third party Z77 motherboards, the DZ77GA-70K offers solid performance, some innovative features, and a truly excellent BIOS. Intel says this board will sell for between $224.00 and $240.00 At the high end of that range it's still $35.00 less than the ASUS P8Z77-V Pro, which is a reasonable tradeoff for the ASUS board's more elaborate features. If you don't need these extra features, this board represents a good value, certainly better than previous Intel boards, especially if you can find one at the lower end of this price range. Pros:
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Comments
1. Most people only boot their systems once a day, if that, and the time spent to get to the Windows desktop is insignificant compared to the time the computer's being used.
2. The time will vary greatly depending on the boot device (regular hard disk, Velociraptor, SSD); the version of Windows being booted, drivers, etc.
Granted, you could use a standard hardware configuration and Windows installation to reduce the number of variables in #2, but I don't think that many people would find it useful. FWIW I didn't notice the board being particularly speedy or slow.
For reference try googling it and see dozens and dozens (hundreds even?) of people on tech forums around the world trying to find this information out :).
Or head over to anandtech and see how almost all of the positive comments mention POST time benchmarking as a great review feature.
As to hardware variability, I would assume by now that any enthusiast knows that overall boot time is greatly effected by hardware, most notably HDD/SSD. However POST time can still make 20 seconds of difference in startup time, considering most machines with SSDs start up in well under a minute, you can see how a lot of everyday users would like to see how they could shave most of this time off.
Once again, thank-you for the great review and for the reply :).
If you want a fast bootup: you should disable all of the motherboard features you don't use, use a small and fast boot device like a SSD without RAID, and don't install drivers and services unless you absolutely need it.