Asus P8Z77-M Pro vs MSI Z77MA-G45

[2ndAttemptHackintosh]

I'm getting my parts list together, and I'm completely stumped between these two boards. I will be using the i7 3770k. I know there's been success with each, and the specs are about the same. The price is close enough that I don't want to consider it into the equation. Here's what I've gathered:

Asus P8Z77-M Pro:
- pathetic reviews on Amazon and Newegg, lots of boards DOA

MSI Z77MA-G45
- someone on the forums was having trouble with hot swapping sata drives, don't know if this is still an issue

Is there anything else I should be looking at?

Anyone have experience with either of these boards?

Halp me decide, pls.

 

[neilhart]

I'm getting my parts list together, and I'm completely stumped between these two boards. I will be using the i7 3770k. I know there's been success with each, and the specs are about the same. The price is close enough that I don't want to consider it into the equation. Here's what I've gathered:

Asus P8Z77-M Pro:
- pathetic reviews on Amazon and Newegg, lots of boards DOA

MSI Z77MA-G45
- someone on the forums was having trouble with hot swapping sata drives, don't know if this is still an issue

Is there anything else I should be looking at?

Anyone have experience with either of these boards?

Halp me decide, pls.

Yes I have both boards. It is about an even trade off. However I finally settled on the ASUS P8Z77-M Pro for the Prodigy "The White One" project. Running the i7-3770K and mild OC is easy and the board's BIOS is durable and easy to use. I did install the patched BIOS.

see: http://www.tonymacx86.com/dsdt/43486-asus-1155-patched-bios-repository.html

neil

 

[2ndAttemptHackintosh]

Thanks for the reply.

"The White One" was actually my inspiration to go ahead and get the Prodigy case. Great work, man. I've got the black one pulled apart and cut up on the workbench right now.

Do you happen to know if the Asus board does okay with hot-swapping? Is this a software issue or something inherent to the MSI board? I know hot-swap is supposed to be part of the SATA standards, but that doesn't mean everyone follows them.

 

[neilhart]

Thanks for the reply.

"The White One" was actually my inspiration to go ahead and get the Prodigy case. Great work, man. I've got the black one pulled apart and cut up on the workbench right now.

Do you happen to know if the Asus board does okay with hot-swapping? Is this a software issue or something inherent to the MSI board? I know hot-swap is supposed to be part of the SATA standards, but that doesn't mean everyone follows them.

While I have any number of "mobile racks" where you mechanically could "hot swap", I find no reason to do it and always power down to change an internal device. I have stacks of hard drives, each labeled with the content and configuration. However I find that I seldom go back to a prior environment and fairly frequently re-configure the oldest hard drive for whatever is the current investigation or project.

That's me. Why are you so interested in the hot swap capability?

neil

 

[2ndAttemptHackintosh]

Hah, I'm the same way with drives. After a few months of not touching any of the data, I figure it's probably not that important.

The reason I was interested in hot swapping was for portable drives. I do a lot of work with music, and therefore large files. I'd like to get away from slow external drives. But now that I think of it, USB3.0 would be ample. 6Gb/s vs 5Gb/s--that's negligible.

 

[neilhart]

Hah, I'm the same way with drives. After a few months of not touching any of the data, I figure it's probably not that important.

The reason I was interested in hot swapping was for portable drives. I do a lot of work with music, and therefore large files. I'd like to get away from slow external drives. But now that I think of it, USB3.0 would be ample. 6Gb/s vs 5Gb/s--that's negligible.

Okay I understand that. I might point out that not all USB3 interface drives preform the same. IMHO the USB3 standard is being abused by the manufactures. I find on my VERY small sample of machines, that "Super High Speed" is not common across all USB3 ports on a given machine. This is usually explained away by the different chip sets used. I have seen 100+GBsec transfer rates on some ports. I do not know if this is impacted by the OS as I only run OS X on the iron. Meaning you may find better drivers in Win7 or Win8.

As an aside, I have a 2TB Seagate external USB3 drive that works great. While I have another no name USB3 drive that does not do so well (I have not opened the drive case to see the manufacture name of the hdd).

neil

 

[spork35]

I can't speak to the MSI board, but I have the p8z77-m pro and I'm pretty happy with it. I bought it at my local Microcenter, so that I had 15 days to return it if it had any issues.

I was inspired by ZenBR's build,
http://www.tonymacx86.com/mountain-...ro-i5-3570k-intel-hd4000-mountain-lion-6.html

I'm running ML 10.8.2 and everything seems to work.
I have a Toshiba 500GB USB3.0 drive that shows up as 'External USB 3.0' in system information.
I haven't measured the speed but seemed pretty fast when I cloned my HD with it.

I initially thought I had display issues with the iGPU HD4000, but I was using the VGA port, which OS X doesn't support in general.

The only thing that I wish the p8z77-m pro had was dual link DVI-D to drive my 27" display up to 2560x1440. The board only supports single link DVI-D which maxes out 1920x1200 (end up with 1920x1080). The HD4000 onchip graphics is capable of putting out 2560x1440 over DVI and displayPort.

If I had to do it over again, I would search the forums for a compatible motherboard that also has displayPort. As it stands now, I'll probably end up getting a dedicated graphics card with the correct output ports and be able to put out 2560x1440 to my 27" ips display.

 

[spork35]

Okay, so I cloned my drive (toshiba caviar basic 3.0) again using the usb3 port to a usb3 external drive and saw the stats. I calculated about 420Mbits/sec. So I'm running usb2.0 type transfer rates instead of the 5Gbits/sec usb3.0 rates.
So it turns out, the usb3.0 port is working as a usb2.0 port.

I haven't tried the rear usb3.0 ports but from reading other posts, it sounds like the Intel usb ports at the middle of the board are known to play better than the ASMedia ports at the rear.

http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-help/64793-10-8-ivy-bridge-usb-3-0-asus-p8z77-m-pro-2.html