Enthusiasts and speed freaks are always looking for an edge – a little something that will help push their gear that little bit faster. There is already a market for pre-overclocked GPUs, and now SSDs are coming with internal RAID to push the boat over the SATA connections. These require little-to-no knowledge of overclocking and are essentially plug and play. When it comes to pushing GPUs higher, and motherboards, we get a dichotomous nature of ‘easy to OC’ against ‘advanced options to push the limits’. In order to meet these two markets, the top four motherboard manufacturers have all come out with their respective weapons for Z77 and Ivy Bridge, aiming for either ~$220 or ~$380, and all of them have broken overclocking records at one stage or another since their release. First up on our battle bridge is the ASRock Z77 OC Formula, designed by ASRock’s in-house overclocker Nick Shih, and commands a paltry $240 for all the goodies.

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