ASRock Z77 Professional Motherboard

Conclusions

The ASRock Z77 Professional is a motherboard targeted to users who want to build a high-end desktop computer and understand the importance of the PLX PEX8608 chip. On motherboards with too many PCI Express devices without a switch chip, you need to manually disable devices on the motherboard setup in order to achieve full performance on devices connected to the USB 3.0 and SATA-600 ports when transferring files at the same time.

The highlights of this motherboard include, besides the abovementioned switch chip, the presence of one additional PCI Express x16 slot (which is 2.0 and works at x4 speed, though), allowing you to install up to three video cards in SLI or CrossFireX configuration, eight USB 3.0 ports, six SATA-600 ports, a high-end voltage regulator circuit, and the “Fatal1ty” mouse port, which allows you to manually configure the polling rate between 250 Hz and 1 kHz.

Also noteworthy is the high-end audio codec used by this motherboard, the Realtek ALC898, which provides very high signal-to-noise ratios (110 dB for the outputs and 104 dB for the inputs), allowing you to use the on-board audio from this motherboard for professional tasks, such as audio editing.

Of course, if you don’t need so many USB 3.0 and SATA-600 ports and/or won’t use several of them at the same time, you can pick a different model and save some money.