Motherboard market is also really hot and all the major brands have introduced their motherboards with very great features and there are many motherboards available in the market today and increases every day. The users have now take interest in motherboards and their features as well. There are variety of motherboards are available of z77 chipset which are launch after the launch of Intel’s 3rd generation CPUs. Today we going to review a z77 based motherboard from BIOSTAR which is BIOSTAR TZ77XE4, BIOSTAR is a new brand as compared to ASUS and Gigabyte and ASROCK but it is very famous in the low budget users these days.
BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 has a nice design with the orange and black color combination and it looks good to me. The BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 has 4 DIMMS for 32 GB RAM and good cooing throughout the motherboard as well. The BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 also has 4x USB 2.0 ports, 2x USB 3.0 and 6x audio jack, DHMI, eSATA and VGA and DVI port for display connection, at back. BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 has some problem with XMP memories as our Corsair Dominator 2666mhz- 16GB memory kit does not work well with BIOSTAR TZ77XE4. The other G.kill 2600 Mhz memory kit get same behavior from BIOSTAR TZ77XE4. There are 8x SATA ports of which 4x SATA 6 Gbps ports and other 4 are SATA 3 Gbps ports. The ports are not color coded so you can’t distinguish between the PCH SATA 6 Gbps and ASMedia SATA 6 Gbps. To be honest I don’t thing the heat sinks are good enough for this motherboard as they are too small to manage the heat especially in overclocking scenarios.
BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 has 2x PCIe (x16) Gen.3.0 slots so yes you can go with SLI/Cross fire options but they does not do well when I tried. It also has 2x PCIe (x4) Gen.2.0 slots, 1x PCIe (x1) Gen.2.0 and 2x PCI slots as well. It also has Realtek ALC-898 audio solution. BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 supports RAID( 0 ,1 ,5 , 10). also include a front panel USB 3.0 within the box so you have total 4 USB 3.0 ports, two at back and two at front. First of all is the SATA settings - it is common place on Z77 to have these set at AHCI as standard, in order to take advantage of such a setting especially in the landscape of SSDs we now live in. Unfortunately,Biostar still resort to enabling IDE by default on the TZ77XE4, which may attribute to some less-thanspectacular SATA port results in other motherboard reviews. For our testing, we have enabled AHCI, and Biostar are now aware of this issue.For overclocking, I typically input values using the keypad. This works most of the time, because NumLock is enabled by default on every motherboard I have reviewed. Unfortunately, it was not enabled on the TZ77XE4 - talking to Biostar, this should be enabled in future BIOS releases.BIOS updating is becoming a prerequisite feature on motherboards, especially if users can do it outside of the operating system. If updating is OS only, a user needs to install the OS first, and then update the BIOS that in itself could cause issues. BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 has a utility software included which helps the user to manage power easily, it name is GreenPower utility. These also a overclock helping software TOverclocking, it helps to control all the aspects from OS and do the overclocking easily as well.
Lets take a look at BenchMarks….
The BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 is looks good by design and orange and black color but its not good to see the small heat sinks on the motherboard. BIOSTAR TZ77XE4 have 8x SATA ports which is good and the overall performance from PCIe slot. It does perform good in memory benchmarks but at 1600 Mhz, it has problems with XMP memories. Overall it has good features and connectivity options and SLI/Crossfire options as well. It has more features at low price. If you have less than $140-$150 for motherboard than it will be not a bad choice at all but obviously it is not a best option for any enthusiast gamer or for heavy video editing PC.
- Good color combination and design.
- Good performance.
- Good connectivity options.
- Low price.
- Good SATA 6 Gbps and USB 3.0 performance.
- Low Power consumption.
- Low quality heat sinks.
- Not the fastest available.
- Problems with XMP memories.
